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Apricot Marmalade
(Conserva di albicocche) Use good and ripe apricots. It is a mistake to believe that jam or marmalade can be obtained with any kind of fruit. Take off the stones, put them on the fire without water and while they boil, stir with a ladle to reduce them to pulp.
When they have boiled for about half an hour, rub them through a sieve to separate the pulp of the fruit from the skins that are to be thrown away, then put them back on the fire with granulated sugar in the proportion of eight tenths, that is to say eight pounds of sugar for ten pounds of apricot pulp. Stir often with the ladle until the mixture acquires the firmness of marmalade, which will be known by putting from time to time a teaspoonful in a plate and seeing that it flows slowly.
When ready, remove from the fire, let it cool, and then put in vases well covered and with a film of paraffine or tissue paper dipped in alcohol, so that the air may not pass in. 215
A plain fruit-and-sugar preserve with no added water and no added pectin, so the set depends entirely on the sugar ratio and how far you cook it down. Two things need updating: the scale, and the way the jars are sealed.
- Scale it downTen pounds of pulp is a market-day quantity. Two pounds of pulp with 1 lb 9 oz of sugar keeps the eight-tenths ratio and fills roughly three half-pint jars; the ratio matters more than the volume.
- The eight-tenths ruleWeigh the sieved pulp, then weigh out 80 percent of that in granulated sugar. This is the hinge of the recipe — apricots are only moderately pectin-rich, and the set comes from that sugar load plus evaporation, not from added pectin.
- Cooking without waterApricots release plenty of juice, but the first half hour over direct heat will scorch in a thin pan. Use a wide heavy-bottomed pot or preserving pan, keep the heat moderate until the fruit collapses, and stir down to the bottom.
- Discard the kernelsTake out the stones and throw them away. Some old preserving recipes crack a few kernels in for flavour; apricot kernels contain amygdalin and should not be added.
- The plate testChill a couple of small plates in the freezer first. A teaspoon dropped on a cold plate should wrinkle and flow sluggishly rather than run. If you use a thermometer, 220F at sea level is the usual jam set point.
- "Vases"A literal rendering of the Italian vasi — simply jars. Use standard canning jars, sterilised and still hot when filled.
- Skip the paraffinParaffin wax and alcohol-dipped tissue were the standard seals of the period and are no longer recommended: the wax cracks as it cools and moulds grow underneath. Process filled jars in a boiling-water bath according to current directions, or simply refrigerate the marmalade and use it within a few weeks.
- RipenessThe opening warning is worth taking seriously. Underripe or mealy apricots give a thin, flat preserve; use fruit that is fully coloured and fragrant but not collapsing.
Conserva in Italian covers a wide family of cooked-down fruit preserves, and the English "marmalade" here is used in its older, broader sense of any thick fruit paste rather than specifically a citrus one. Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919) belongs to the same domestic tradition as Pellegrino Artusi's late nineteenth-century manual, which likewise set fixed sugar-to-pulp proportions for fruit conserves; the brisk insistence that not every fruit will make jam is very much in that voice. Apricots ripen all at once and will not keep, which is why instructions like this one belong to the business of holding onto a short season. The paraffin seal places the recipe firmly in its decade: wax was an ordinary household closure before the two-piece screw lid and the boiling-water bath became standard advice.