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Preserved Siberian Crab-apples

Preserved Siberian crab-apples are sweetened and boiled with lemon, then stored in bottles.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,551 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Preserved Siberian Crab-apples

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Put the sugar and water in a saucepan with the sliced lemons.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. Skim the surface.

  4. Simmer until it becomes a thin syrup.

  5. Let the syrup cool to tepid.

Prepare and cook the apples

  1. Wipe the crab-apples.

  2. Remove the stalks from the crab-apples.

  3. Add the crab-apples to the tepid syrup.

  4. Bring the mixture to a boil again.

  5. Cook gently for ten minutes.

  6. Leave the apples in a basin overnight.

  7. Return the mixture to the pan.

  8. Boil until the apples look clear.

Bottle

  1. Put the apples into wide-mouthed bottles with a slice of lemon on top.

  2. Cork the bottles lightly.

  3. Sterilize the bottles.

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

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

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

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

  3. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).

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

Siberian crab-apples
Provide the fruit that is cooked until clear and preserved in the syrup.
Loaf sugar
Forms the syrup that sweetens the fruit and helps preserve it.
Lemons
Add acidity and aroma to the syrup and are placed on top in the bottles.

The step that matters

Boil until the apples look clear. Boiling the apples in the syrup lets sugar slowly replace the water in the fruit, so they turn clear and firm. Boiling too hard or too long can break the fruit apart.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (crab, sugar, lemon):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, sugar, lemon. 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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