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Crab Apple Jelly

A jelly made from Siberian crab apples, water, and sugar.

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 Jelly

Oven, in the book's wordsA warm oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Select firm Siberian crab apples.

  2. Wash them.

  3. Cut the crab apples in half. Remove stems and blossoms.

  4. Place the apples in a preserving kettle. Cover with cold water.

Extract the juice

  1. Heat over a slow fire until boiling. Cook until the apples are soft.

  2. Strain the juice through a colander into an earthen vessel. Let it stand overnight.

  3. In the morning, strain the juice carefully through a flannel jelly bag.

  4. Measure the juice.

Make the jelly

  1. Return the juice to the preserving kettle and bring it to a boil. Boil for 15 minutes, skimming as needed.

  2. Warm the sugar in a shallow pan in the oven without melting it.

  3. After boiling the juice for 15 minutes, add the warm sugar. Boil for an additional 5 minutes.

  4. Remove from heat. Pour into jelly glasses or bowls.

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

Siberian crab apples
Provide the fruit and natural pectin that set the jelly.
Granulated sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the juice gel when boiled with it.

The step that matters

Adding the warm sugar after 15 minutes of boiling. Warming the sugar keeps it from cooling the boiling juice and dissolves it quickly, so the mixture returns to a boil and sets properly without crystallising. Boiling the juice first concentrates it so it can gel.

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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