Why it works: Sugar and crab 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 ↓
To Preserve Siberian Crabs
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the crabs
Rub the crabs with a dry cloth, being careful not to break the skin.
Prick each crab all over with a needle to prevent bursting.
Make the syrup and cook the crabs
Boil the sugar in water until dissolved.
Add the crabs and boil until the skin begins to crack.
Remove the crabs and drain them on a dish.
Boil the syrup again, adding more sugar if needed.
Preserve
Once cooled, pour the syrup over the crabs in jars, seal tightly, and store in a cool, dry place.
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.
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Sugar + crabtop 19% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked 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
- Siberian crabs
- Provide the fruit that is cooked and preserved whole in syrup.
- Sugar
- Sweetens the fruit and, in a thick syrup, helps preserve it.
The step that matters
Pricking each crab before cooking. Pricking lets steam and pressure escape from the fruit, so the skin does not burst during boiling and the crabs keep their shape in the syrup.
“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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