Name: Crab Apples
Ingredients: 2-3 pounds white cream; equal amounts of red, yellow, and chocolate cream

Crab Apples

Crab Apples are confection made from white cream and equal parts red, yellow, and chocolate cream, shaped into balls and crystallized.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription

From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients

Why it works: Cream and chocolate are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,466 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Crab Apples

Ingredients

2-3 pounds white cream
equal amounts of red, yellow, and chocolate cream

Directions

Shape the candy

Form the creams into triangular strips.
Place the strips together to form a round roll.
Roll out the roll into a strip about 1 inch in diameter.
Cut the strip into equal-sized pieces.
Roll each piece into a ball.
Make indentations on both ends of each ball with a sharp stick.

Set and finish

Arrange the balls in pans.
Crystallize.

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.

Cream + chocolatetop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,466 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

White cream: Makes up the bulk of each candy, giving sweetness and a smooth, firm body.
Red, yellow, and chocolate cream: Provide the colour contrast that makes each candy look like a different apple.

“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.