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Preserve Crab Apples

Preserve crab apples by boiling with sugar and grape leaves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and grape match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,659 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Preserve Crab Apples

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Place crab apples in a kettle with grape leaves and alum.

  2. Keep the mixture scalding hot for about 1 hour.

  3. Remove the apples, skin them, and remove the seeds, leaving the stems intact.

  4. Soak the apples in cold water.

Make the syrup and cook

  1. Make a syrup by combining 1 pound of sugar with 1 pound of apples.

  2. Wipe the apples and add them to the syrup.

  3. Gently stew until the apples look clear.

  4. Remove the apples and boil the syrup longer.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Apple + grapetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,659 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  2. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Crab + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together407 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).

  4. Crab + appletop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together343 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Grape + sugartop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,490 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Crab apples
Provide the fruit and natural pectin that helps the preserve set.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and thickens the syrup while helping preserve the fruit.
Alum
Firms the fruit flesh so the apples hold their shape during cooking.
Grape leaves
Add tannins that help keep the fruit firm during long heating.

The step that matters

Keep the mixture scalding hot for about 1 hour. Heat softens the fruit, but it must stay below a rolling boil. Alum and grape-leaf tannins firm the pectin in the skins and flesh so the apples hold their shape. Boiling too hard breaks the fruit apart.

Swap the grape

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (crab, apple, sugar):

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Quincefits better
  3. Plumfits about as well
  4. Grapethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, apple, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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