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Crab Apple Jelly and Marmalade

Crab apples are boiled, strained, and sweetened with sugar to produce a clear jelly or marmalade.

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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Select good, sound crab apples and remove any defective portions.

  2. Wash the apples and combine them with 3 quarts of water in a pot.

  3. Boil slowly for 1 hour, ensuring the apples are covered with water.

Strain and make the marmalade

  1. Strain the mixture through a jelly bag without pressing to keep the juice clear.

  2. Boil the clear juice for 10 to 15 minutes.

  3. Add heated sugar at a ratio of 1 pint of sugar for each pint of juice and boil for an additional 5 minutes.

  4. Alternatively, press the pulp through a sieve, add 1 pint of sugar for each pint of pulp, and cook until the desired consistency is reached.

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 form the marmalade's body and set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it thicken and set as it cooks.

The step that matters

Strain through the jelly bag without pressing. Pressing forces cloudy pulp through the bag, which makes the juice cloudy. Letting it drip keeps the juice clear and the finished marmalade bright.

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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