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Crab-apple Jelly

A preserve made from crab-apples, water, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and sugar 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 Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Place the crab-apples in enough water to cover them and boil until tender.

  2. Mash the apples with a spoon and strain through a jelly bag.

  3. For every pint of juice, use 1 pound of sugar.

  4. Heat the sugar in the oven and the juice in a preserving kettle.

Make and seal the jelly

  1. Once the sugar is hot, add it to the juice and boil for 30 minutes.

  2. Pour the jelly into glasses, cover with brandied paper, and seal tightly.

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

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

  2. Crab + sugartop 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).

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

Red crab-apples
Provide the fruit pectin and tart flavour that set the jelly once the juice is boiled.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and helps it set firm by binding water and pectin together.

The step that matters

Boiling the sugar and juice for 30 minutes. Boiling drives off water and concentrates the pectin and sugar so the jelly reaches its setting point. Too short a boil leaves it runny, while over-boiling can darken and toughen it.

Swap the apple

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

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

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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