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Crab Apple Jelly

A jelly made from crab apple juice, lemon juice, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Crab and lemon work together. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 387 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Crab Apple Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Wash and quarter the crab apples without coring them.

  2. Cover the crab apples with 1 to 2 inches of cold water and cook until mushy.

  3. Pour the mixture into a coarse cotton bag or strainer to extract all the juice.

  4. Place cheese cloth over a colander on a crock and pour in the juice, allowing it to strain.

  5. Repeat the straining process, rinsing the cloth frequently.

Make the jelly

  1. For every pint of juice, add the juice of 4 lemons and ¾ pound of sugar.

  2. Boil the juice for 10 to 20 minutes, stirring constantly while sifting in the sugar.

  3. Continue boiling for 5 minutes longer to ensure it will jelly.

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. Crab + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together387 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Crab + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together407 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Large siberian crabs
Provide the pectin and natural acidity that let the juice set into jelly.
Juice of 4 lemons
Adds acidity that brightens flavor and supports gel setting.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and, with the cooked fruit, helps it set firm.

The step that matters

Boiling the juice with sugar. Boiling must be long enough for the sugar and pectin to reach the gel point; stopping early leaves runny jelly, while overcooking can scorch the sugar and dull the flavor.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Vanillafits about as well
  4. Applefits less well

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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