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Dessert

Crab Apple

Preserved crab apples in a clear sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and apple 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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Leave the stem on the apples.

  2. Pierce the apples with a large needle.

Make the preserves

  1. Make a syrup by dissolving the sugar in water until clear.

  2. Add the apples to the syrup and boil for 30 to 40 minutes.

  3. Carefully remove the apples and place them on a dish to cool.

  4. Once cooled, transfer the apples to jars and strain the hot syrup over them.

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. Sugar + appletop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + crabtop 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).

Sugar and apple 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 preserves and, dissolved in water, forms the syrup that preserves the fruit.
Crab apples
Provide the fruit and its tartness, which balances the sweetness of the syrup.

The step that matters

Boiling the apples in the syrup. Boiling for too long can break down the fruit and make it mushy, while boiling too briefly leaves it under-cooked. Sugar must be fully dissolved first so the syrup is clear and does not crystallise on the fruit.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, crab. 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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