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Crab Apple Marmalade

A marmalade made by cooking crab apples with water and sugar until jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Crab Apple Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Wash and core the crab apples, then chop them using a meat chopper.

  2. Place the chopped apples in a preserving kettle and add enough water to just cover the top layer of apples.

Cook and sweeten

  1. Cook the mixture until the apples are soft.

  2. Weigh the cooked apples and add an equal weight of sugar.

  3. Cook until the mixture forms a jelly when cooled.

Jar and seal

  1. Pour the marmalade into sterilized glasses and cover with paraffin.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).

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

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

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, pectin and tartness that give the marmalade its body and flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it set into a jelly as it cooks.

The step that matters

Cook until the mixture forms a jelly when cooled. Sugar and fruit pectin set only when enough water has evaporated and the sugar concentration is high enough. Undercooking leaves a runny marmalade, while overcooking can make it stiff and dark.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, 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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