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Dessert

Crabapple Jelly

A preserve made from crabapples, sugar, and optional rose geranium leaves, boiled and set in a jelly bag.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Rose and geranium work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 64 recipes. Both carry cis-rose oxide, which smells green, flower. The science ↓

Crabapple Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Wash crabapples and cut them in halves.

  2. Place crabapples in a kettle and add enough water to cover them.

  3. Cook thoroughly.

Make the jelly

  1. Strain through a jelly bag and let it drip.

  2. For every cup of juice, add a cup of sugar and boil for about 20 minutes.

  3. Add rose geranium leaves if desired.

Jar and seal

  1. Pour into glasses.

  2. Cover the top with melted paraffin when cold.

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. Rose + geraniumtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together64 recipes

    Shared aroma: cis-rose oxide (green, flower).

  2. Sugar + rosetop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,584 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + geraniumtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together46 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Crabapples
Provide the fruit and natural pectin that help the jelly set.
Sugar
Sweetens the juice and helps the jelly set and keep its texture.

The step that matters

Boil the juice with sugar for about 20 minutes. Boiling concentrates the juice and dissolves the sugar so the pectin and sugar can form a gel. Too short a boil can leave the jelly runny, while overcooking can make it stiff or cause sugar to crystallize.

“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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