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Dessert

Crab Apple Jelly

A jelly made from tart apples and Siberian crab apples, sweetened with sugar and flavored with lemon essence.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,551 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Crab Apple Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Pare and cut the tart apples into pieces.

  2. Cut the Siberian crab apples into pieces, removing the seeds.

  3. Add a little water.

  4. Boil until reduced.

  5. Strain the mixture.

Make the jelly

  1. Add 1 pound of white sugar for each pint of juice.

  2. Flavor with lemon essence.

  3. Boil until it becomes a fine jelly.

  4. Leave in a stone jar overnight, covered closely.

  5. The next morning, strain the jelly into molds.

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 + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Crab + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together387 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).

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

Siberian crab apples
Provide the main fruit flavour and natural pectin needed to help the juice set into jelly.
Tart apples
Add extra pectin and acidity, helping the jelly firm up and balancing sweetness.
White sugar
Sweetens the juice and, with boiling, helps it thicken into a jelly that holds its shape.

The step that matters

Boil until it becomes a fine jelly. Sugar and pectin set only at the right concentration, so boiling too briefly leaves a runny result while overboiling can make the jelly stiff or cloudy.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, sugar, lemon. 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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