Apricot Whip

Things aren't really broken unless they break twice.

Apricot Whip 1 tbsp gelatin, or 1 (¼-oz) envelope 1 tbsp water 1 cup dried apricots (6 to 8 ounces) ½ tsp lemon juice, if desired 1 cup cream ½ cup sugar Mix the gelatin and water, set aside. Simmer the apricots until very soft. When they are done, save the cooking water. Force the hot apricots through a sieve, or puree them with a stick blender. Add the gelatin and (if desired) the lemon juice. Mix in enough cooking water to make them about the consistency of whipped cream. If desired, blenderize again after thinning the mixture. Whip the cream and sugar in a large bowl. (Add a little more sugar if the apricots are tart.) Then fold in the apricots. Transfer to the container of your choice. Chill and serve. Source: Handwritten manuscript, 1930s-1940s Notebook of Hannah Dannehy O'Neil

After we unplugged our refrigerator so it could melt out its internal ice clots, we had about a week of perfectly chilled food. In a fit of daring, I spent enough money to get a whole carton of eggs and a lot of fresh produce. A few days after our first normal grocery trip in over a month, things weren't quite as frosty as they had been. Before I knew it, the refrigerator couldn't even get cold enough to use as an oversized wine chiller. The damn thing was trying really hard to die again, and all our groceries were slowly expiring within.

Of course, we couldn't just go out and buy another refrigerator. In the pre-pandemic era, it was easy to get an old working one. A quick search through Craigslist (or the various sites that superseded it) always showed plenty of listings with agreeably low prices. But these days, nobody is unloading a perfectly good refrigerator just because it looks outdated. And so, we hastily bought a secondhand mini-fridge to tide us over (those are still cheap), ordered more parts, and endured a week of shipping delays.

Aside from the groceries, I really hated losing all the various things that I put in the back of the fridge for when the time was right. The lemon juice I occasionally add to marinades. The extra chopped bell pepper that I was going to throw into the frying pan the with the rest of dinner at some point. The half-egg I had saved a week earlier for the next time I wanted a very small batch of cookies. And a whole lot of other frozen odds and ends that are always nice when our food needs a little pep. Sometimes it's a nice way to surprise myself: "Oh, I forgot we had these extra tomatoes in here! They'll be really good in tomorrow's soup!"

And then came the reluctant auditing of "What can last a few days outside of the refrigerator, even if the label says we really shouldn't?" We went through the various bottles and jars with remarks like "They leave barbecue sauce out all day at restaurants, right?" and "I'm pretty sure the pickles will be fine."

But things weren't as bad as they could have been. For one thing, the mini-fridge was so big it barely fit in my car.  And we were suddenly grateful for the countertop ice maker that we hadn't liked enough to plug in for a long time. I bought it when I got tired of fussing with ice trays. We then used it for about three months before deciding it was even more of a faff than the ice trays it replaced.

This ice maker doesn't keep ice frozen. The machine just makes more as the ice slowly drips back into its water tank. Anyway, it had sat unused on the counter with a trash bag on top to keep out the dust. And now, it was one of the few things keeping me from completely losing my mind. If I'd lost ice-cold drinks on top of everything else, I would have snapped.

Then the refrigerator parts arrived, got installed, and things were blessedly cold again! We loaded it with all the cans in the pantry to see if it could keep up, or if it would fail to chill all the food. After it passed the test, we tentatively made enough dinner to have leftovers. After a week passed with no more appliance outages, I decided it was safe to officially welcome its return to service.

It was the best Diet Coke I've had in weeks.

I wasn't planning to celebrate the return of refrigeration twice. I'd rather the refrigerator had only broken once. But all good things should be celebrated. For this refrigerator party (hopefully the last), I consulted my great-grandmother's binder and found a nice, chilled salad.

Undated newspaper (Chicago area), probably 1930s-1940s

As I often forget, "the relatives from Chicago" were by definition midwestern, so they probably thought a gelatin loaded with ginger ale, canned pineapple, marshmallows, and maraschino cherries was a salad. I'm still not sure why this isn't a dessert, but I think two things make it a salad: First, you're supposed to put mayonnaise on top (pineapple juice notwithstanding). Second, this recipe starts with a box of lemon Jello. From what I can tell, lemon Jello equals salad at least three-fourths of the time. (And of course, we are supposed to serve this on lettuce!)

I thought it looked like a perfectly nice dessert if you skip the lettuce and mayo. But for whatever reason, this recipe got politely hesitant responses from everyone else. Maybe they thought the marshmallows were a bit over the top? I flipped though the notebook, looking for another recipe that demands refrigeration. I thought about making a prune whip whether everyone liked it or not, but that recipe involved whipping raw egg whites. And while I normally don't get hung up on raw eggs, ours have been in a dying refrigerator twice. We're not even risking soft-scrambled eggs until we use the last of them up.

And so, a few pages away from the Mardi Gras "Salad," we found a recipe which doesn't involve any raw eggs and incited no complaints!

This recipe looks very on-brand for (I'm guessing) the 1930s. In one recipe, we have to puree dried fruit, whip cream, and then serve everything cold. Each of those steps is easy now that we have blenders, electric mixers, and refrigerators. But in those days, a recipe like this was a statement.

As I opened the package of apricots, I noticed it said "product of Turkey." In earlier times, I would have thought that was mildly interesting, or briefly contemplated the environmental implications of shipping fruit across the planet. But now, I was thinking "How much longer will we get these?"

While we were thinking about the geo-economical implications of fruit and international politics, our gelatin was soaking in its alotted tablespoon of water. That didn't seem like enough water, but I'm not the person writing down the recipe.

Cooking dried fruit seems like a basic kitchen task, but it's a totally new process to me. I had no idea how to tell when they're done. Since we're directed to "run thru strainer," I let them simmer until they were soft enough to do just that. Some of the apricots nearly dissolved in the water after 5 minutes, but others remained hard and tough for half an hour. (Also, that yellow-ish clod on top is the gelatin.)

To my own surprise, the stick blender wasn't faster than sieving the fruit like it's still 1930. (Or at least, it took about as long as I imagine sieving would have.) But I'm glad I used a belnder anyway. Our sieve probably couldn't withstand the force of shoving things through it. 

This was a good time to pause and taste-test. The recipe says to "add more sugar if the apricots are tart," which is not a problem I can imagine anyone dealing with in this millennium. (Well, maybe if you know someone with an apricot tree in their yard.) I went the opposite route and added a tiny splash of lemon juice to help the flavor pop. 

As I mashed the stick blender into the paste, it looked I had ruined the apricots. Furthermore, the hot gelatin made the fruit smell like barf. Really, it's impressive that 1910s and 1920s marketers sold gelatin as the key to hyperfeminine and "dainty" desserts (they always used the word dainty). The horrible stink pushes all thoughts of lace and roses right out of my mind.

To my relief, the awful gelatin smell didn't spread throughout the house. The kitchen reeked, but the adjacent rooms only smelled like simmering fruit.

After blenderizing all our apricots, we had a really hard paste. And as we learned from Maida Heatter's chocolate chiffon pie, you want everything to be about the same consistency when folding together a gelatin. Our apricot paste would have knocked all the air out of the cream anyway. And if we deflated the cream, we wouldn't have an apricot whip, would we? So, I'm going to assume that my great-grandmother knew to thin out the apricot pulp. (Or maybe I was supposed to use fresh apricots instead of dried?) And if she copied this from a book, I think whoever originally wrote the recipe assumed that you didn't need an introductory course on gelatin.

After preparing the fruit paste to become a well-chilled masterpiece, I whipped the cream in the biggest bowl we have. I know it looks like a pointless use of extra-large dishes, but it is so nice to have all that extra room when you fold in the apricots. The big bowl gives you room to do it in a few quick, swoopy motions.

See? Done. And no need to worry about sloshing your anything onto the countertop.

Our apricot whip was an unexpectedly bright and cheery shade of yellow. I thought it looked really cute. It's true that we still had some persistent chunks of fruit pulp in there, but I had decided after 30 minutes on the stove that the apricots were as soft as they were going to get.

After transferring our creation to a smaller bowl, I took a taste off the rubber spatula. And... this is good. Like, really good. I thought it'd taste like apricots, but really it tastes like fruit. I was impressed that I got a flavor this good out of dried apricots with no artificial assistance- they're always so bland right out of the bag.

And now it was time to do those blessed directions: "Chill and serve." I am so glad we can now do that again.

This was a lot better than I thought it would be. It tasted surprisingly like I had used fresh fruit. And it had a perfect, airy texture. It's perfect for the summertime, or (since it avoids out-of-season fruit by using them dried) when you want things to seem a bit more summery in the bleak midwinter. It was a lot better than the ingredients suggested, and worth making if you don't mind how bad things look before you get to the end of the recipe.