Fruit
Most Mellow
Apricots
are like those enviable people we all know — who are laid-back and never
attention grabbing, yet attract everyone with their natural warmth and easy
charm
I could never understand why the
dried fruit boxes that came at Diwali contained dried apricots. Nuts and
raisins were obvious, since you could eat them at once, but the apricots
weren't as enticing. These weren't the large fleshy dried apricots, either
golden or dark brown and with stones removed that come from Turkey these days,
but the dry, pebble-like jardaloos from the hills, with chewy flesh clinging to
the stone inside. After the boxes were raided you would usually find the
jardaloos left untouched.
I only realised the allure of apricots in a Goan restaurant in Mumbai. New Martins Hotel is a small, spartan looking place in Colaba that turns out a few simple, delicious Goan dishes like their sausage chilly fry, which has already featured in this column. In keeping with its simplicity it only offers one dessert a day — either custard and jelly, or apricot custard, which simply consists of a bowl of semisolid custard with a couple of jardaloos soaked in light syrup at the bottom.
This may not seem too good, especially since the custard is almost certainly made with custard powder, not with eggs, milk and sugar from scratch, but somehow it's perfect. After the spicy food, a small bowl cool sweetness is great, but unlike most restaurant desserts it's not too sweet and rich. It's the sort of dessert one might eat at home, but the soaked apricots also elevate the custard. Soaking some dried fruits can make them mushy, but jardaloos gain a creaminess that complements the custard, and their flavour has a musky sweetness that is not overpowering.
Apricots are the most mellow of fruit. In the family of stone fruits, peaches have a bright, almost citrus-like acidity, cherries are sour-sweet, plums can have unexpected bitter notes, but apricots usually offer perfect balance. Fresh apricots are sweet, but not too much, juicy but not dripping, with few excessive sour and bitter notes. They offer a general fruitiness that complements other flavours well, which is why patissiers love using them, yet
they never become anonymous either. Apricots are like those enviable people we all know, who are laid-back and never attention grabbing, yet attract everyone with their natural warmth and easy charm.
As with most stone fruit, apricots originated in Central Asia, but have a long history in the hills of India. They are hardy trees, suited to the rough soils and poor irrigation of the dry, cold slopes and desert plateaus like Ladakh. George Francis White in his illustrated travelogue Views in India, Chiefly Among the Himalaya Mountains
(1838) wrote how most villages had apricot trees: "Many deserted villages are now indicated only by the apricot trees which still remain to show 'where once a garden smiled.'" They were grown, he noted, as much for the high quality oil extracted from their kernels, as for their fruit, which was usually dried: "In India, particularly, the preserved apricot, having an almond substituted for the stone, is reckoned a great delicacy."
Apricots have one problem as a fruit, enshrined in their name. It derives from the Latin praecox, meaning early, and it is one of the first trees to come into flower and then fruit after the winter. This also means it is one of the most vulnerable to early frosts and spring rains, which is why it has acquired a reputation as being hard to find when ripe; 'fil mishmish' say Egyptians, which means 'when apricots bloom', but its real meaning is 'almost never', a more elegant way of saying "when pigs have wings'.
CD's editor would empathise. His family has apricot trees in the hills, and he says the fruit is wonderful, but so chancy and hard to transport that it is impossible to get in Mumbai. The small, vividly coloured fruit that do make it here are disappointing, with a mealy consistency and poor taste. (They are better for their kernels which look and taste like small almonds, but extracting them from the stones without crushing them is quite a skill). Much much better, though also way more expensive, are the Afghani apricots that sometimes come to Mumbai. Pale fleshed and rosy skinned, like peaches, they have an incredibly creamy, sophisticated, musky-sweet taste. I have to avoid walking past the one stall in Crawford Market that gets them, or I'll succumb to their bankrupting addictiveness.
But it is part of the accommodating nature of apricots that they make up for their elusive freshness by being easily available dried. The taste is different, of course, but not as much with prunes, which take the bitter-sweetness of plums to dark, minerally depths. Apricots become slightly more intense and sour when they dry, yet they retain some of the sunny lightness of the fresh fruit. This is particularly so with the large orange ones, which are treated with sulphur dioxide to which some people are unfortunately allergic. They can have the untreated dark ones, which have a more cooked, toffee-like taste. I have also had gingerflavoured versions of these which have a fascinating complexity of taste.
Dried apricots are a great snack food — packed with nutrients, and not sticky like prunes, so easier to store and eat. Hunza apricots, which are much like jardaloos, and which are grown in Afghanistan, have such a high reputation for increasing longevity that they are sold at absurd prices in the West. Since they are not too sweet, they are also good cooked with meat dishes — lamb with apricots is a Middle Eastern treat, which has come to India as the Parsi speciality of jardaloo sali boti. Niloufer Ichaporia King's wonderful book My Bombay Kitchen has several excellent jardaloo recipes, like cooking it with chicken or her mother's apricot trifle which used a Prohibition era trick of spiking it with the ayurvedic 'natural' grape wine called Drakshasava.
My mother also makes a great trifle from stewed dried apricots layered onto cake and covered in cream. A simpler way to enjoy them is just to stew them with sugar and lime juice to make a compote which is great to eat with yoghurt, or add more sugar and make them into a delicious jam (for jam from the fresh fruit, look for small producers from the hills like Bhuira and Umang). ITC used to make a canned version of the Hyderabadi delicacy Khubani-ka-Meetha, which is a superior apricot jam, and it was one of the best Indian canned foods.
But one of my best recent discoveries is of an Australian cake made with dried apricots and coconut. The coconut adds moistness and a background richness (but cuts down on butter), while the apricots add colour and warmth. It's a great example of the versatile value of apricots, perfectly tailored for Indian tastes. I don't have space for the recipe, but if readers are interested, please mail me and I'll send it to you.
——— Vikram Doctor CDET120824
I only realised the allure of apricots in a Goan restaurant in Mumbai. New Martins Hotel is a small, spartan looking place in Colaba that turns out a few simple, delicious Goan dishes like their sausage chilly fry, which has already featured in this column. In keeping with its simplicity it only offers one dessert a day — either custard and jelly, or apricot custard, which simply consists of a bowl of semisolid custard with a couple of jardaloos soaked in light syrup at the bottom.
This may not seem too good, especially since the custard is almost certainly made with custard powder, not with eggs, milk and sugar from scratch, but somehow it's perfect. After the spicy food, a small bowl cool sweetness is great, but unlike most restaurant desserts it's not too sweet and rich. It's the sort of dessert one might eat at home, but the soaked apricots also elevate the custard. Soaking some dried fruits can make them mushy, but jardaloos gain a creaminess that complements the custard, and their flavour has a musky sweetness that is not overpowering.
Apricots are the most mellow of fruit. In the family of stone fruits, peaches have a bright, almost citrus-like acidity, cherries are sour-sweet, plums can have unexpected bitter notes, but apricots usually offer perfect balance. Fresh apricots are sweet, but not too much, juicy but not dripping, with few excessive sour and bitter notes. They offer a general fruitiness that complements other flavours well, which is why patissiers love using them, yet
they never become anonymous either. Apricots are like those enviable people we all know, who are laid-back and never attention grabbing, yet attract everyone with their natural warmth and easy charm.
As with most stone fruit, apricots originated in Central Asia, but have a long history in the hills of India. They are hardy trees, suited to the rough soils and poor irrigation of the dry, cold slopes and desert plateaus like Ladakh. George Francis White in his illustrated travelogue Views in India, Chiefly Among the Himalaya Mountains
(1838) wrote how most villages had apricot trees: "Many deserted villages are now indicated only by the apricot trees which still remain to show 'where once a garden smiled.'" They were grown, he noted, as much for the high quality oil extracted from their kernels, as for their fruit, which was usually dried: "In India, particularly, the preserved apricot, having an almond substituted for the stone, is reckoned a great delicacy."
Apricots have one problem as a fruit, enshrined in their name. It derives from the Latin praecox, meaning early, and it is one of the first trees to come into flower and then fruit after the winter. This also means it is one of the most vulnerable to early frosts and spring rains, which is why it has acquired a reputation as being hard to find when ripe; 'fil mishmish' say Egyptians, which means 'when apricots bloom', but its real meaning is 'almost never', a more elegant way of saying "when pigs have wings'.
CD's editor would empathise. His family has apricot trees in the hills, and he says the fruit is wonderful, but so chancy and hard to transport that it is impossible to get in Mumbai. The small, vividly coloured fruit that do make it here are disappointing, with a mealy consistency and poor taste. (They are better for their kernels which look and taste like small almonds, but extracting them from the stones without crushing them is quite a skill). Much much better, though also way more expensive, are the Afghani apricots that sometimes come to Mumbai. Pale fleshed and rosy skinned, like peaches, they have an incredibly creamy, sophisticated, musky-sweet taste. I have to avoid walking past the one stall in Crawford Market that gets them, or I'll succumb to their bankrupting addictiveness.
But it is part of the accommodating nature of apricots that they make up for their elusive freshness by being easily available dried. The taste is different, of course, but not as much with prunes, which take the bitter-sweetness of plums to dark, minerally depths. Apricots become slightly more intense and sour when they dry, yet they retain some of the sunny lightness of the fresh fruit. This is particularly so with the large orange ones, which are treated with sulphur dioxide to which some people are unfortunately allergic. They can have the untreated dark ones, which have a more cooked, toffee-like taste. I have also had gingerflavoured versions of these which have a fascinating complexity of taste.
Dried apricots are a great snack food — packed with nutrients, and not sticky like prunes, so easier to store and eat. Hunza apricots, which are much like jardaloos, and which are grown in Afghanistan, have such a high reputation for increasing longevity that they are sold at absurd prices in the West. Since they are not too sweet, they are also good cooked with meat dishes — lamb with apricots is a Middle Eastern treat, which has come to India as the Parsi speciality of jardaloo sali boti. Niloufer Ichaporia King's wonderful book My Bombay Kitchen has several excellent jardaloo recipes, like cooking it with chicken or her mother's apricot trifle which used a Prohibition era trick of spiking it with the ayurvedic 'natural' grape wine called Drakshasava.
My mother also makes a great trifle from stewed dried apricots layered onto cake and covered in cream. A simpler way to enjoy them is just to stew them with sugar and lime juice to make a compote which is great to eat with yoghurt, or add more sugar and make them into a delicious jam (for jam from the fresh fruit, look for small producers from the hills like Bhuira and Umang). ITC used to make a canned version of the Hyderabadi delicacy Khubani-ka-Meetha, which is a superior apricot jam, and it was one of the best Indian canned foods.
But one of my best recent discoveries is of an Australian cake made with dried apricots and coconut. The coconut adds moistness and a background richness (but cuts down on butter), while the apricots add colour and warmth. It's a great example of the versatile value of apricots, perfectly tailored for Indian tastes. I don't have space for the recipe, but if readers are interested, please mail me and I'll send it to you.
——— Vikram Doctor CDET120824
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