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Crab Apple and Apple Jelly

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Lemon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Crab Apple and Apple Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Wash the crab apples and cut them into small pieces without peeling.

  2. Barely cover the apples with cold water in a pot.

  3. Cook until the apples are soft, then strain the mixture.

  4. For added flavor, cook with a little lemon or orange peel or root ginger.

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. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Apple + gingertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,424 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

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

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

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

  5. Crab + gingertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together59 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (crab, apple, ginger):

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Quincefits better
  3. Plumfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, apple, ginger. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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