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Wild Crab Preserves

Preserves made from wild crab fruit and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Crab and sugar work together. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 407 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells grass, green. The science ↓

Wild Crab Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Pour boiling water over the wild crab fruit to remove the skin.

  2. Push the core out with a quill.

Cook the preserves

  1. Combine the fruit and sugar in a pot.

  2. Cook over medium heat until thickened.

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Wild crab fruit
Provides the main fruit flavor and the pectin that helps the preserves set.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps it thicken into a preserve by drawing out moisture.

The step that matters

Cook over medium heat until thickened. Cooking drives off water and concentrates the sugar and fruit pectin, which is what lets the mixture set as a preserve. Too little cooking leaves it runny, while too much can scorch the sugar and darken the flavor.

“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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