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Preserved Crabapples

Preserved crabapples are apples preserved in sugar syrup with spices and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Preserved Crabapples

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Select small yellow apples, leaving stems on.

  2. Combine 1 pound of sugar with the apples and a bag of spices in a pot.

  3. Boil the apples until tender, then remove with a perforated skimmer.

  4. Measure the juice and use 1 pint of juice for every pound of sugar.

Make the syrup and preserve

  1. Boil the spices again with the syrup and add the juice of a large lemon.

  2. When the syrup thickens, boil the apples in the syrup for 15 minutes.

  3. Transfer the apples to jars and pour the boiling syrup over them.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Small yellow apples
Provide the fruit that is cooked into tender pieces and preserved in syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, as a thick syrup, helps preserve it.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the sweetness of the syrup.

The step that matters

Boil the apples in the syrup only after the syrup thickens. Boiling the fruit in syrup that is not yet thickened can leave it watery and less preserved. Letting the syrup reduce first concentrates the sugar, which helps the apples hold their shape and keep well in the jars.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, 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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