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Dessert

Crab Apples

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

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 Apples

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Place crab apples in a preserving kettle and cover with cold water.

  2. Boil until the skin breaks.

  3. Remove each apple, skin them, and take out the seeds with a penknife.

Make the preserve

  1. Make a syrup with 1 pint of water and 1 pound of sugar for every pound of fruit.

  2. When the syrup is clear, add the apples and boil until they are transparent.

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, pectin and tartness that give the preserve its body and flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, once dissolved, helps preserve the fruit and make it transparent.

The step that matters

Boil the apples in the syrup until transparent. Boiling too briskly can break the apples apart or darken them. Gentle simmering lets sugar slowly replace the water in the fruit, which is what makes it translucent and firm.

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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