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Dessert

Crabapple Sweet Pickle

A sweet pickle made from crab apples, vinegar, sugar, and spices, simmered and packed in jars.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove 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 ↓

Crabapple Sweet Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Weigh the crab apples.

  2. Measure out the vinegar and sugar.

  3. Put the apples in a kettle with boiling water and stew gently for 10 minutes.

  4. Drain the apples.

  5. Layer the apples back in the kettle, sprinkling each layer with sugar.

Make the syrup

  1. Stir the cinnamon, cloves, and ground mace into the vinegar.

  2. Bring the vinegar to a boil.

  3. Pour the boiling vinegar over the apples.

  4. Boil for 5 minutes.

  5. Remove the fruit with a skimmer.

  6. Spread the fruit on platters to cool.

  7. Boil the syrup until thick.

Pack and seal

  1. Pack the pickles in jars.

  2. Fill the jars with the boiling syrup.

  3. Seal the jars immediately.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Cinnamon + macetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Crab apples
Provide the fruit that becomes the pickles, holding their shape during stewing and soaking.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavor and helps preserve the pickles.
Granulated sugar
Adds sweetness and, as it draws into the syrup, helps preserve the fruit.
Broken stick cinnamon
Contributes warm, sweet spice aroma to the syrup and fruit.
Ground mace
Contributes a warm, nutmeg-like aroma to the spiced syrup.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup until thick. Boiling concentrates the sugar and vinegar, so the syrup thickens and preserves the fruit. Undercooked syrup stays thin and can spoil sooner.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Gingerfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, apple, vinegar, sugar, cinnamon, clove. 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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