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Crab Apple Jelly

A preserve made from crab apples, 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 crabs without coring them.

  2. Cover the crabs 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 cheesecloth 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 and check if 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
Their natural pectin and acid provide the gel structure that lets the juice set into jelly.
Juice of 4 lemons
Adds acidity, which supports pectin setting and brightens the flavour.
¾ pound sugar
Sweetens the jelly and helps it set firm and hold its shape when boiled.

The step that matters

Boiling the juice with sugar until it jellies. Boiling must be long enough to concentrate the sugar and pectin so the jelly sets, but stirring constantly while sifting in sugar prevents scorching and lumps. Overcooking can make the jelly stiff, so check for setting at the end.

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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