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Apricot Cream
(France.) Stone and slice 1 pint of cooked apricots, add juice of a lemon, 4 ounces sugar, and a tablespoonful of Maraschino or Kirsch cordial. Boil, stirring it, add 3/4 ounce melted gelatine, in a cup of hot water, press through a sieve, set on ice in a dish, stirring until almost firm.
A gelatine-set fruit puree of the sort that filled the "cold sweets" pages of turn-of-the-century books. The instructions are compressed, and the gelatine quantity is the point that needs attention.
- Gelatine, converted with careThree-quarters of an ounce is roughly three 1/4-oz envelopes of modern powdered gelatine. Soften it in a little cold water before dissolving it in the cup of hot water rather than "melting" it directly; sheet and shred gelatines of the period were less reliably standardised, so start with two envelopes for the pint of fruit here if you want a spoonable cream rather than a sliceable mould.
- A pint of apricotsMeasured by volume, not weight: about 2 cups of cooked fruit, which is roughly 1 lb fresh apricots stewed down, or two drained 15-oz cans. Canned fruit in syrup will need the sugar reduced by half.
- SugarFour ounces is 1/2 cup plus a little. With ripe or canned apricots that is generous; taste the hot puree before the gelatine goes in, bearing in mind that chilling mutes sweetness and that the lemon is already doing work here.
- Sieve before it coolsThe order in the original matters. Press the mixture through the sieve while it is still hot and fluid; once the gelatine begins to set, the skins and fibres will not go through and you get a stringy cream.
- "Set on ice"A bowl set over ice water, stirred, chills faster and more evenly than a refrigerator shelf. Stir until it thickens to the consistency of soft cream -- the recipe's "almost firm" -- then stop.
- The cordialMaraschino here means the dry cherry-stone liqueur, not the syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Kirsch is the usual substitute and is added off the boil in modern practice, since the point is aroma and boiling drives it off.
Books of this kind — collections of dishes gathered from abroad and labelled by country — were a familiar publishing genre around 1900, and a recipe marked "(France.)" carried a certain cachet. The dish itself is a crème d'abricots in the plainest sense: fruit puree set with gelatine, part of a large family of gelatine sweets that spread once commercially packaged gelatine made the old business of boiling calves' feet unnecessary. Apricots were a natural candidate, since their acidity and strong perfume carry well through both cooking and chilling. The splash of maraschino is period signature — the liqueur, generally traced to the Dalmatian coast around Zara, was a common flavouring in nineteenth-century confectionery and appears in fruit creams, charlottes and ices.