Why it works: Crab and sugar work together. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 407 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells grass, green. The science ↓
Wild Crab Preserves
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the fruit
Pour boiling water over the wild crab fruit to remove the skin.
Push the core out with a quill.
Make the preserves
Combine the fruit and sugar in a pot.
Cook until thickened, stirring occasionally.
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.
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Crab + sugartop 19% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together407 recipes
Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Wild crab fruit
- Forms the bulk of the preserve and supplies its main flavour.
- Sugar
- Sweetens the preserve and, as it cooks down, helps it thicken.
The step that matters
Cooking until thickened. As water evaporates, the sugar and fruit concentrate and the mixture thickens. Stirring occasionally keeps the sugar and fruit from sticking and scorching on the base of the pot, which would give a burnt taste.
“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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