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Crab Apple Sweetmeats

A preserve made by boiling crab apples in a sugar syrup.

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 Sweetmeats

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Combine sugar and hot water in a preserving kettle and let stand over boiling water to dissolve.

  2. Clean the crab apples and prick them with a coarse needle, leaving the stems on.

Cook

  1. Bring the syrup to a boil, then add the prepared crab apples.

  2. Boil until the apples are tender enough for a straw to reach the core.

Pack

  1. Pack the sweetmeats into cans and screw down the covers immediately.

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 that becomes tender and holds its shape in the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, dissolved in water, forms the syrup that preserves it.
Hot water
Dissolves the sugar to make the syrup the apples cook in.

The step that matters

Boil until tender enough for a straw to reach the core. Boiling in a concentrated sugar syrup softens the fruit gradually. Stopping too early leaves the core firm, while overcooking can break the apples apart.

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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