40 Fun Facts About Apricots

Which US military service considers apricots such bad luck that its members avoid eating them near tanks?

The Marine Corps superstition runs so deep that many crews will not even say the fruit's name, calling them cots or A-fruit instead. It has been documented since at least the Vietnam War.

Apricot kernels contain amygdalin, a compound that can release which deadly poison when the seeds are eaten?

Cyanide is released as the body breaks amygdalin down, and European food-safety officials warn that eating just three small bitter kernels can exceed the safe limit.

Which sweet Italian liqueur often gets its nutty flavour from apricot kernels?

Amaretto brands such as Disaronno take their nutty flavour from apricot kernel oil and contain no almonds at all. Legend credits a Saronno innkeeper who steeped the kernels in brandy in 1525.

Which ancient Chinese philosopher is said to have taught his students in a forum ringed by apricot trees?

Confucius and his apricot-shaded classroom, described by the writer Zhuangzi, left such a mark that the phrase apricot altar still means the world of education in written Chinese.

Los Altos, once a farm town known for its apricot orchards, now sits on the edge of which technology hub?

Silicon Valley was built over what had been the world's largest fruit-growing and packing district until the 1960s. Los Altos, where the first Apple computers were assembled in a garage, still keeps an orchard at its civic centre.

Apricot is the name of a soft orange coat colour in which dog breed, originally used to retrieve wildfowl from water?

Poodle coats come in apricot as well as black, white, silver and red, a dainty palette for a breed that most likely began as a water dog in Germany.

Which conqueror, whose empire reached India, is traditionally credited with introducing the apricot to Greece?

Alexander the Great is given the credit for bringing the fruit west, and within a few centuries orchards were established across Greece and Italy.

In Egyptian Arabic, a promise to do something tomorrow, when the apricots are in season, is a wry way of saying what?

It will never happen is the message, because Egypt's apricot season is so short and unreliable that anything promised for it may not arrive. The retort works much like the English one about flying pigs.

The apricot is the national fruit of which mountainous country, where most of the crop grows on the Ararat plain?

Armenia has grown the fruit for so long that botanists once assumed it began there, and around 50 varieties are still cultivated in the country.

Which US state grows almost all of the country's commercial apricot crop, far ahead of Washington and Utah?

California dominates the harvest, and its town of Patterson has styled itself the Apricot Capital of the World since 1971, with a fiesta held every June.

Which famous Viennese chocolate cake hides a layer of apricot jam beneath its glossy dark icing?

Sachertorte takes its name from Franz Sacher, the Austrian confectioner who created it, and in one story he was a teenage apprentice baking for Prince Metternich.

Malatya, a city nicknamed the Land of Apricots and famed for its sun-dried fruit, is in which country?

Turkey's dried apricots come almost entirely from one region: Malatya Province supplies about 95% of the national crop.

The word apricot probably comes from a Latin term for early-ripening fruit, a root shared with which English adjective?

Precocious first described fruit that ripened ahead of time, and Romans seem to have regarded the apricot as a peach that was ready sooner than the rest.

Apricot trees belong to which plant family, shared with apples, pears, strawberries and almonds?

Rose relatives fill the fruit bowl, since the family ranks among the six most economically important groups of crop plants and also supplies cherries, peaches and raspberries.

Drying apricots concentrates their nutrients, leaving the fruit especially rich in which mineral?

Potassium passes a fifth of the daily value in 100 grams of dried apricots, well ahead of the banana, whose reputation for the mineral outruns its modest 12%.

Ground apricot shells are used in face scrubs as a natural replacement for which tiny plastic particles?

Microbeads have been banned from rinse-off cosmetics in countries including Canada, France and New Zealand, pushing scrub makers towards crushed fruit stones and cocoa husks.

Austria's Marillenknödel, made with whole apricots, are which kind of dish?

Dumplings of this kind were so loved by Emperor Ferdinand I that he is remembered for demanding them from his cook even when apricots were out of season.

Apricot jam is a classic filling for hamantaschen, the three-cornered pastries baked for which Jewish festival?

Purim bakers shape the pastries after Haman, the villain of the Book of Esther, and apricot sits beside poppy seed among the best-loved traditional fillings.

Botanists class the apricot, like the cherry, olive and mango, as which type of fruit?

Drupe is the botanist's word for a stone fruit, and the group is broader than it sounds, taking in coffee, pistachios and cashews as well as peaches.

Which discredited cancer remedy made from apricot kernels has been sold under the misnomer vitamin B17?

Laetrile is a chemical derivative of the kernels' amygdalin and not a vitamin at all, and studies have found it useless against cancer while carrying a real risk of poisoning.

Barack, often called the best known of all apricot brandies, is a traditional fruit spirit of which country?

Hungary makes barack as a kind of pálinka, and the word covers two fruits: the apricot is the yellow barack and the peach the autumn one.

Qamar al-Din, a thick drink made from sheets of apricot paste and popular during Ramadan, comes from which country?

Syria is so tied to the fruit that in Argentina and Chile the apricot is called damasco, a name that seems to point to Damascus. The drink is served cold and thick after a day of fasting.

In Chinese, the poetic title Expert of the Apricot Grove is a traditional compliment for members of which profession?

Doctors earned the title through Dong Feng, a healer of the Three Kingdoms era who took no fees and asked each cured patient to plant apricot trees, until a whole grove surrounded him.

Most American apricot orchards descend from seedlings carried to the West Coast by which group of newcomers?

Spanish missionaries planted the trees that founded the western industry, although settlers had already carried apricots to the colonies of the New World in the 17th century.

Apricot Computers, a fruit-named maker of business PCs that peaked in the 1980s, was based in which country?

Britain's Apricot, with its research centre in Birmingham, was one of the first computer makers to use 3.5-inch disks, at a time when larger 5.25-inch floppies were the norm.

Eva Rivas sang Apricot Stone, with an apricot tree on stage, as her country's 2010 entry in which competition?

Eurovision Song Contest viewers saw the tree appear after a dancer watered an apricot stone on stage, and the entry went on to finish seventh in the final.

Which sour, salty Japanese pickle, often eaten with rice, is made from a fruit that botanists class as an apricot?

Umeboshi are brined ume, a fruit whose tree sits in the apricot section of its genus despite the English name it usually goes by. They are often tucked inside rice balls.

Which preservative keeps dried apricots bright orange, while untreated fruit turns dark brown as it dries?

Sulphur dioxide blocks the browning reactions that would otherwise darken the fruit, so the paler a dried apricot looks, the more of the gas it generally holds.

A cheaper paste made from ground apricot kernels and sugar is used by confectioners in place of which sweet?

Marzipan made the costly way uses almonds, so makers add a pinch of starch to persipan, letting a simple iodine test tell the two apart. It often turns up inside German stollen.

Spring frosts are the main enemy of apricot growers because the trees do what unusually early in the year?

Blossom opens before the leaves, in early March in western Europe, so a single cold night can wipe out a whole year's crop.

Genetic studies place the apricot's original home in which region, far from the country its scientific name points to?

Central Asia was proposed as the cradle by the Soviet botanist Nikolai Vavilov, and DNA work later bore him out, tracing separate domestications to what are now Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.

In John Webster's tragedy The Duchess of Malfi, the spy Bosola offers the Duchess apricots to test whether she is what?

Pregnant women were believed to crave apricots, which were also thought to bring on labour, so the gift works as a trap for the secretly married Duchess.

Mebos, a salted and sugared confection of dried apricots first used as a remedy, is a treat from which country?

South Africa got the treat through enslaved people brought across the Indian Ocean to the Dutch Cape Colony, and the Voortrekkers later carried it inland.

The Golden Apricot is the top prize of an international film festival, founded in 2004, in which capital city?

Yerevan's festival also hands out Silver Apricot prizes, and since 2005 it has run under the wing of the European Cultural Parliament.

Aged apricot wood is used to make which double-reed instrument, heard on the soundtrack of Gladiator?

Duduk players know it as the apricot pipe, and UNESCO has listed the instrument and its music as a masterpiece of humanity's intangible heritage.

Which Austrian wine region, a UNESCO World Heritage landscape, is also famous for its apricot orchards?

Wachau orchards line the Danube between the towns of Melk and Krems, and the fruit goes into local liqueurs alongside the region's better-known wines.

Dried apricots were an important commodity on which ancient trade network?

Silk Road caravans could carry them over huge distances without spoiling, thanks to the dried fruit's long shelf life.

Which aromatic compound, also used in cherry-flavoured sodas, gives apricot kernels their almond-like taste?

Benzaldehyde occurs naturally in apricot kernels, peach stones and almonds alike, and a synthetic version is the flavouring in imitation almond extract.

Which 18th-century botanist gave the apricot the scientific name it still carries today?

Carl Linnaeus borrowed the species name from Gaspard Bauhin, who had earlier filed the fruit under a Latin phrase describing it as a kind of apple.

Apricots are among the fruits eaten at the seder of which Jewish festival, marked in Israel by planting trees?

Tu BiShvat is the new year for fruit trees, and its seder dates from the 16th century, when the kabbalist Yitzchak Luria and his disciples in Safed gave each fruit a symbolic meaning.