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Crab Apple Jelly

A preserve made by cooking crab apples with water and sugar to form a 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 Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Wash the crab apples, cut them up, and remove defects, seeds, and blossom ends without peeling.

  2. Place the apples in a large pot and cover with water.

  3. Boil until soft, but do not mash.

Extract the juice

  1. Drain the water and mash the apples with the back of a silver spoon.

  2. Put the mashed apples in a jelly bag over a deep dish to collect the juice.

  3. For every pint of juice, add a pint of loaf sugar.

Make the jelly

  1. Boil and skim the mixture.

  2. After 30 minutes, dip the jelly into tumblers using a silver spoon.

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
Supply pectin and tartness that help the juice set into jelly.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the jelly and helps it set firm while preserving it.

The step that matters

Boil and skim the mixture. Sugar and pectin must be boiled together long enough to reach the setting point, or the jelly stays runny. Boiling too long can make it stiff or darken its flavour. Skimming removes foam and impurities so the jelly is clear.

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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