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Dessert

Preserved Crab-apples

A preserved fruit made by boiling crab-apples with sugar, water, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,551 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Preserved Crab-apples

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the crab-apples, leaving the stems on.

Make the syrup

  1. In a pot, combine sugar and water; boil until the scum ceases to rise.

  2. Add lemon juice to the syrup.

Cook the fruit

  1. Add the crab-apples and boil until tender.

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 + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

  3. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).

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

Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, at high concentration, helps preserve it by drawing out water.
Crab-apples
Provide the fruit, tart flavor and pectin that gives the preserve body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and supports pectin set.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup until the scum stops rising. Skimming foam as it rises removes impurities from the sugar syrup, giving a clearer, cleaner preserve. Stopping at this point keeps the syrup's sugar concentration steady before the fruit goes in.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, sugar, lemon. 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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