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Dessert

Crabapple Jelly

A preserve made from crabapples, water, sugar, optional rose geranium leaves, and set with melted paraffin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Rose and geranium work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 64 recipes. Both carry cis-rose oxide, which smells green, flower. The science ↓

Crabapple Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Wash crabapples and cut them in halves.

  2. Put them in a kettle with enough water to cover.

  3. Cook thoroughly, then strain through a jelly bag and let it drip.

Make the jelly

  1. For every cup of juice, add a cup of sugar and boil for about 20 minutes.

  2. Add 2 or 3 rose geranium leaves if desired.

Pot and seal

  1. Pour into glasses and cover the top with melted paraffin when cold.

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. Rose + geraniumtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together64 recipes

    Shared aroma: cis-rose oxide (green, flower).

  2. Sugar + rosetop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,584 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + geraniumtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together46 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Crabapples
Provide natural pectin and tartness that help the juice set into jelly.
Sugar
Adds sweetness, helps the juice gel, and preserves the jelly.

The step that matters

Boiling the juice with sugar. Pectin, acid and sugar must reach a full boil together to set. Boiling too briefly leaves a runny jelly, while overboiling can dull the flavor and make it stiff.

“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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