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Spiced Crabapple Jelly

A jelly made from crab apples, vinegar, water, cloves, allspice, cinnamon, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Spiced Crabapple Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Cut crab apples in half and discard any decayed portions.

  2. Cover the apples with equal parts vinegar and water.

  3. Add the bag of whole cloves, allspice, and cinnamon.

  4. Boil until the apples are tender.

  5. Strain the apples overnight in a jelly bag.

Make the jelly

  1. Use 1 pint of sugar for each pint of juice.

  2. Boil the juice for 10 minutes.

  3. Heat the sugar in the oven.

  4. Add the heated sugar to the boiling juice.

  5. Stir well.

  6. Boil for about 3 minutes or until it jellies.

Set and serve

  1. Pour into glasses.

  2. Let harden overnight.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  5. Apple + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,774 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Crab apples
Provide the pectin and natural acidity that let the juice set into jelly.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and helps it set firm when boiled with the juice.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that helps extract flavour and supports gel formation.

The step that matters

Boiling the juice with the sugar until it jellies. Jelly sets only when enough sugar and acid are concentrated by boiling to the gel point. Stopping too early leaves runny jelly, while boiling too long can make it stiff or cloudy.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Quincefits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Orangefits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, vinegar, clove, allspice, cinnamon, 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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