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Siberian Crab Jelly

A jelly made by boiling crabs, draining them, and cooking a syrup and sugar mixture to set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Syrup and sugar match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,842 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Siberian Crab Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crab liquid

  1. Boil a peck of crabs in enough water to cover them for two hours.

  2. Place the crabs in a jelly bag and allow them to drain without squeezing.

Make the jelly

  1. In a pot, combine 1 pint of syrup with 1 pound of loaf sugar.

  2. Boil the mixture for half an hour.

  3. Use the reddest crabs for a beautiful color in the 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. Syrup + sugartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).

  3. Crab + syruptop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Crabs
Provide the flavor and the color of the finished jelly.
Syrup
Adds sweetness and body to the liquid that becomes the jelly.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness and, as the mixture boils down, helps it thicken and set.

The step that matters

Let the crabs drain without squeezing. Squeezing the jelly bag pushes fine solids through the cloth, which makes the strained liquid cloudy. Letting it drip on its own gives a clearer jelly.

“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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