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Dessert

American Crab-apple Jam

A jam made from crab-apples, caster sugar, white wine, optional lemon peel and cloves, boiled and jarred.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and clove are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,774 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

American Crab-apple Jam

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderately hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Remove all stalks and unsound parts from the crab-apples and wipe them dry.

  2. Spread the apples out before a fire to ensure the skins are thoroughly dried.

Make the jam

  1. Weigh the fruit and place it in a preserving pan with an equal weight of caster sugar and enough white wine to moisten.

  2. Boil the mixture well and skim thoroughly.

  3. Add the fruit and optional lemon peel or cloves while boiling.

  4. Continue boiling until the fruit begins to break, then transfer it to large glass jars.

  5. Seal the jars when the jam is cold.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Apple + white winetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together372 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. White wine + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

American crab-apples
Provide the fruit, pectin and tart flavour that form the body of the jam.
Caster sugar
Sweetens the jam and, at equal weight to the fruit, helps it set and keep.
White wine
Moistens the mixture at the start so the sugar dissolves and the fruit begins to cook gently.

The step that matters

Continue boiling until the fruit begins to break. Under-boiling leaves the jam runny and unset, while over-boiling darkens and flattens the flavour. The fruit breaking down signals that pectin has been released and the mixture is ready to thicken.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Quincefits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, apple, sugar, white wine, 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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