The apricot belongs to the genus Prunus and to the great stone-fruit clan of the rose family, kin to the peach, the cherry, the plum, and the almond. Its formal Latin name, Prunus armeniaca, preserves an ancient misidentification. When the Greeks first encountered the fruit coming westward along the trade routes, they called it mēlón armeniakon, the Armenian apple, and the Romans followed with malum armeniacum; the name settled on Armenia as the homeland, and there it remained in the botanical binomial for two millennia. But Armenia was not the origin: it was the port of entry into the western world, the place where the fruit first became visible to the Mediterranean peoples who would carry it through the centuries.

The true cradle of the apricot lies in China, almost certainly in the foothills of the Tian Shan and Kunlun ranges and the river valleys of what is now Xinjiang and Gansu, and perhaps also in the hill country of Hebei and Shanxi, where wild apricots — Prunus armeniaca and its near relatives — grow spontaneously. China has cultivated the apricot for perhaps five thousand years; the earliest written record dates to the Xia dynasty, and by the Zhou period (1046–256 BCE) the fruit appears regularly in texts as a cultivated tree of the orchard garden. The Chinese name, xìng (杏), is entirely unconnected to any Armenian or Persian word, confirming the fruit's wholly independent eastern origin. Confucius is said by tradition to have taught his disciples beneath an apricot tree, and the orchard that arose from that teaching gave the Chinese language one of its most enduring metaphors: xìng lín, the apricot grove, became the word for a school and for the profession of teaching itself.

From its Chinese homeland the apricot moved in two directions simultaneously. Westward, along the proto-Silk Road and through the great oasis cities of Central Asia — the Ferghana Valley, Sogdiana, Bactria — it entered the orchards of what would become the heartland of the apricot world. By the first millennium BCE the fruit was being cultivated in Persia, and the Persians made it their own: the Persian word zardālū (literally 'yellow plum') is a purely indigenous description, a Persian invention for a fruit the Persians had absorbed from the east and transformed into a culinary staple. Northward and south-eastward from its Central Asian home, the apricot also reached the isolated mountain valleys of the Karakoram, above all the Hunza Valley of what is now northern Pakistan, where the small, intensely flavoured mountain apricot became not merely a food but the foundation of a subsistence culture, pressed against sun-warmed stone walls in summer and dried to a translucent amber that fed whole communities through the high-altitude winters.

The apricot that entered Armenia came from Persia and the wider Central Asian corridor. The Armenians, a people with deep roots in orchard culture, took to it with a fervour that has never diminished. The Armenian tsiran (ծիրան) is inseparable from the national identity: the fruit of the volcanic plateau, dried by the fierce summer sun into the amber leather that sustained households through long winters, pressed into the fruit leather the Armenians call pastegh or ttu lavash, and consumed fresh in June with a pleasure unequalled by any other stone fruit. From Armenia the fruit crossed into Pontus and the lands of Greek and Roman contact, and so acquired the name by which the Western world would know it for ever after.

The apricot's westward journey from China is one of the great undocumented passages of fruit history, achieved not in a single voyage or by any named carrier but through the slow diffusion of trade, cultivation, and cultural exchange across the whole breadth of Asia. By the time it reached Rome, it had already been re-domesticated, refined, and made the subject of an entire culinary tradition in Persia and Armenia; Rome received not the original Chinese fruit but something already deeply transformed.

The Romans first encountered the apricot through their contact with Armenia and the surrounding territories. For Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century CE, it was still a recent curiosity and a luxury, a malum armeniacum that had only arrived in Italy in the principate of Augustus, brought first as a garden novelty by the horticulturalist L. Aelius Stilo. The fruit probably came to Italy via several routes simultaneously, from Armenia through Pontus and the Greek world, and perhaps also through Judaea and the wider eastern Mediterranean; but the Plinian name locked Armenia into the fruit's Western identity for two thousand years. The Romans grew the apricot in their kitchen gardens and ate it fresh, preserved in honey, and cooked in sweet and savoury preparations: the recipes gathered under the name of Apicius include a method of stewing stone fruits with cumin, honey, and wine that was likely applied to apricots as to other pruna.

The Arab conquests of the seventh century CE and the flowering of Abbasid civilisation in Baghdad gave the apricot a new and enormously productive chapter. The Arabic mishmish became one of the definitive ingredients of medieval Islamic court cooking: dried apricots were folded into the sweet-and-sour lamb stews and murabbas that the Abbasid kitchens refined to a high art. The tenth-century Kitāb al-Ṭabīkh of Ibn Sayyar al-Warrāq, the most comprehensive medieval Arab cookbook, contains several preparations centred on apricots, including the mishmishiyya, a saffron-and-apricot lamb stew of great sophistication.

From Baghdad the dried apricot moved in the same direction as the wider Arab Mediterranean expansion: westward across North Africa, where the Maghrebi kitchen absorbed the dried fruit into the tagines of Morocco; and northward into Iberia, where the fruit entered the orchards of al-Andalus and gave the Spanish their word for it — albaricoque — from the Arabic al-barqūq. From Moorish Iberia the apricot passed into France: by the time the gardeners of Provence and the Rhône Valley established their orchards in the mid-sixteenth century, the apricot was already the most prized stone fruit of the southern French summer, grown in kitchen gardens from Avignon to Lyon and made into the preserve that became the most universal glaze in the French pastry kitchen.

The Dutch East India Company brought the apricot to South Africa when Jan van Riebeeck established the VOC's victualling station at the Cape in 1652 and immediately planted an orchard to provision the passing ships. Apricots flourished in the Western Cape's warm, dry Mediterranean climate, and within a generation they had become established as a Cape fruit, grown in the orchards of Stellenbosch and the Hex River Valley, preserved, candied, and dried. The Cape Malay community who cooked for the VOC garrison absorbed the apricot into their spiced Indian Ocean cooking with immediate enthusiasm: the dried fruit and the thick apricot jam (konfyt) became the defining sweet note of the Cape Malay curry, differentiating it at once from any Indian, Javanese, or Malay equivalent, and giving the cooking of Bo-Kaap one of its most distinctive and beloved flavours.

The final chapter of the apricot's westward journey was written in California. The Spanish missionaries who built the chain of California missions in the late eighteenth century carried apricots from Mexico along the Camino Real, and the mild, reliable summers of the Santa Clara and San Joaquin Valleys proved ideal. By the late nineteenth century California had become the dominant world producer of dried apricots, a position it held until the mid-twentieth century, and the California apricot found its most passionate custodians in the large community of Armenian immigrants who had settled in the San Joaquin Valley around Fresno — bringing with them not only the oldest cultivation tradition but a cultural reverence that linked the golden fruit to the Armenian homeland and the ancient orchards of Ararat.

Turkey is today the world's largest producer of apricots by a very considerable margin, and the dried Turkish apricot — flat, bright orange, intensely sweet and sour — is one of the most distinctive dried fruits in the world's kitchens, dispatched to Morocco, Iran, Britain, South Africa, and Australia alike. Iran follows Turkey in production, and Uzbekistan, whose dried apricots and the preserved qaysi of the Ferghana Valley remain the most prized in Central Asia. Pakistan's Gilgit-Baltistan and the Hunza Valley grow the small, aromatic mountain apricot, eaten fresh in summer and pressed against sun-warmed stone walls or spread on flat rooftops to dry in the fierce high-altitude sun; the dried Hunza apricot is nutritionally remarkable and carries a depth of flavour quite unlike the Turkish or Californian commercial product.

The apricot divides sharply into its fresh and dried identities, and they are used in quite different ways. The fresh apricot, at its best in June and July in the Northern Hemisphere, is a fruit of fleeting perfection: the tightly packed, golden-orange flesh, faintly acid and highly aromatic, that does not improve in transit and must be eaten or preserved at the moment of ripeness. France makes the finest use of the fresh fruit in its tarts and preserves; the tarte aux abricots and the confiture d'abricots are amongst the glories of the French kitchen, and the apricot jam is the universal glaze of the French pastry kitchen, brushed over every fruit tart and millefeuille and glazed cake. The dried apricot is the workhorse of the world's kitchens: Morocco folds it into the lamb and chicken tagines that are the centrepiece of the Ramadan table; Persia dissolves it into the slow khoresh stews that marry meat and fruit with a sophistication unmatched elsewhere; the Cape Malay cooks of Bo-Kaap dissolve it into the sauce of their curries; and the whole of Central Asia and the Levant serves it at the festive table alongside nuts, raisins, and the sweets of the New Year.

The apricot kernel has a culinary world of its own. The sweet kernel of certain cultivars — particularly the Central Asian and Hunza varieties — is eaten as a nut, rich in oil and faintly reminiscent of almond; the bitter kernel contains amygdalin and is toxic in quantity, but it is used in trace amounts as a flavouring in a handful of traditional preparations and is the source of a prized cosmetic oil. In French patisserie, the practice of cracking fresh apricot stones and dropping the bitter kernels into the jam as it cooks — a technique codified in the confiture d'abricots tradition — captures a faint bitter-almond note that lifts the preserve far above its commercial equivalents. In China the kernel, xìngrén (杏仁), is used medicinally and in sweet soups and desserts, sometimes reaching Western markets under the label 'Chinese almond', a source of some confusion.