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Dessert

Preserved Crabapples

Preserved crabapples are Siberian crabs preserved in sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Preserved Crabapples

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crabs

  1. Wash the ripe Siberian crabs.

  2. Put the crabs in a kettle.

  3. Cover the kettle with boiling water.

  4. Simmer until the skin peels easily.

  5. Drain the crabs.

  6. Skin the crabs.

  7. Remove the cores with a penknife.

  8. Weigh the crabs.

Make the syrup

  1. Use an equal weight of sugar.

  2. Dissolve the sugar in half the amount of water.

  3. Boil the sugar solution.

  4. Skim until clear.

Cook and preserve

  1. Add the crabs to the syrup.

  2. Boil slowly until tender.

  3. Skim and stir as necessary.

  4. Transfer to small jars or tumblers.

  5. Cover with syrup.

  6. Let cool.

  7. Seal as you would jelly.

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

Ripe siberian crabs
Provide the fruit that becomes tender and flavourful as it cooks in syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, with the boiling, helps preserve it in a syrup.

The step that matters

Boil slowly until tender. Cooking gently lets the crabapples soften through without breaking apart. Boiling too hard can split the fruit and cloud the syrup, while undercooking leaves the flesh firm.

“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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