By Jane Gibb I love finding the first beautiful orange-coloured apricots that appear in my garden each December for a very brief period. Apricots have been cultivated for thousands of years and are thought to have originated in Armenia, the mountainous country bordered by Turkey on the one side and Georgia on the other. The delicate flavour of apricots is intensified by cooking them, which makes them an ideal fruit for squirrelling away in bottles. I remember as a child watching my parents lugging boxes of apricots into our family home, on a farm in foothills of the Victorian Alps, near Mansfield, marking the beginning of the bottling season. It was an exciting time as our kitchen filled with the scrumptious perfume of the stewing fruit, and my mouth was already watering at the thought of eating preserved apricots with my breakfast or after dinner with a dollop of cream or ice cream. At...
