My grandmother’s book, Old Time Recipes for Home Made Wines, written in 1909, contains recipes for making wine from all sorts of plant material from fruits and vegetables to herbs and flowers. It also reveals changes in customs, speech, and spelling, and one of these is the spelling of apricot. When you read apricock instead of apricot, do not think it a typo, it is exactly as Grandmother wrote it several times in the book including the index.
In the words of Grandmother (Helen S. Wright)
Take three pounds of sugar, and three quarts of water; let them boil together and skim it well. Then put in six pounds of apricocks, paired and stoned, and let them boil until they are tender; then take them up and when the liquor is cold bottle it up. You may if you please, after you have taken out the apricocks, let the liquor have one boil with a sprig of flowered clary in it; the apricocks make marmalade, and are very good for preserves.
To buy Old Time Recipes for Homemade Wines by Helen S. Wright Click Here.
Karen Meyers