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Crab Apple Preserves

A preserve made by boiling crab apples with sugar and water.

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 Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Pick out nearly perfect crab apples, leaving the stems on.

  2. Put them in a preserving kettle with enough warm water to cover.

  3. Heat to boiling slowly and simmer until the skins break.

  4. Drain and skin the apples, then extract the cores with a paring knife through the blossom ends.

Make the preserves

  1. Weigh the apples and add 1½ lbs. of sugar and ½ cup of water for each pound of fruit.

  2. Boil the water and sugar together until the scum ceases to rise.

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 siberian crab apples
Provide the fruit flavor and natural pectin that helps the preserves thicken and set.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps preserve the fruit by binding water and inhibiting spoilage.

The step that matters

Boil the water and sugar until the scum stops rising. Skimming off the foam that rises as the syrup boils removes impurities, so the syrup stays clear and the preserves look clean and bright.

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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