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Apricot Jam
Pare and stone 3 pounds of apricots, add 1 pound of sugar, and let them stand 8 hours. Then cook them, with a few of the kernels, and another 1 1/2 pounds of sugar, making in all 2 1/2 pounds to each 3 pounds of fruit. Boil gently, mash with a spoon until thick, and put in jars.
Two things put this one outside what we can recommend: the kernels dropped into the pot, and the total absence of any sealing or processing step. The points below explain the specific problems rather than offering a rewritten method.
- The kernels are the real issueApricot stones contain amygdalin, the same cyanogenic glycoside that makes bitter almonds bitter; chewing or crushing releases hydrogen cyanide when enzymes and moisture meet. Cooking drives off some of it but the amount left depends entirely on how many kernels went in, how broken they were and how long the pan boiled, none of which this recipe fixes. "A few of the kernels" is not a measurable dose, and several national food agencies now advise against eating apricot kernels at all.
- Why the kernels were thereThey were used as a flavouring, not a food: whole or lightly cracked kernels give the almond-marzipan note that reads as "apricot" to many palates. Bitter almond extract or a drop of natural almond flavouring does the same job, and is what many modern preserving books suggest in their place.
- "Put in jars" is not a preserving instructionThere is no sterilising of jars, no hot-fill, no lid, no water-bath time. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century jam was often poured hot and sealed with a paper cover or a disc of melted wax, which relies on a high sugar concentration and a cool larder to hold mould at bay. Modern practice fills hot into hot sterile jars and processes sealed jars in boiling water for a measured time.
- The sugar ratio tells you the set is marginalTwo and a half pounds of sugar to three pounds of fruit is roughly 45 percent sugar by weight before any water boils off, which is lower than the 60-plus percent soluble solids a shelf-stable jam needs. Boiled long enough it will concentrate, but "mash with a spoon until thick" gives no endpoint, so a batch can easily be sealed too wet to keep.
- What the eight-hour stand doesSugaring the fruit and leaving it draws juice out by osmosis and firms the flesh, so the pieces hold shape rather than collapsing to purée. That part of the technique is sound and survives in modern macerated-fruit jams; it is not the problem here.
- If you want to make apricot jamUse a current tested recipe with weighed sugar, a stated set point or thermometer temperature, and a processing time for the jar size. Leave the kernels out.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a run of turn-of-the-century books in which American and British cooks collected dishes picked up abroad, and this jam is a plain European housewife's method: macerate, boil, mash, pot. The kernel trick is old and widespread — French confiture d'abricots, Central European Marillenmarmelade and English apricot preserves often called for a handful of blanched kernels or a few noyaux, on the reasoning that the stone carried the flavour the flesh only hinted at. The same logic gave the kitchen ratafia, noyau and crème de noyaux, all built on the almond note in stone fruit pits. That the danger was not much discussed says something about the period: amygdalin had been identified in the 1830s and prussic acid was well known to chemists, but domestic cookery treated a few kernels as seasoning, and the cautious modern advice to avoid them entirely is largely a late twentieth- and twenty-first-century arrival.