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Siberian or Crab-apples

A preserved apple recipe using Siberian or crab apples boiled in a sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Crab and sugar work together. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 407 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells grass, green. The science ↓

Siberian or Crab-apples

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Wipe the apples and leave the stem on.

  2. Prick the apples with a large needle to prevent cracking.

Cook in syrup

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

  2. Add the apples to the syrup and boil for 20 minutes.

Cool and jar

  1. Remove the apples and place them on a dish to cool.

  2. 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. Crab + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together407 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Make up the fruit, which softens in the syrup while keeping its shape.
Sugar
Dissolves into the syrup to sweeten the fruit and help preserve it.

The step that matters

Pricking the apples. Heating causes the skin to expand and crack. Pricking with a needle gives the trapped steam a way out and lets the syrup reach the flesh.

“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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