Skip to main content
Main

To Preserve Siberian Crabs

A preserve made by boiling sugar syrup with Siberian crabs and optional citrus peels.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

To Preserve Siberian Crabs

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Rub the fruit with a dry cloth, being careful not to break the skin.

  2. Prick each fruit with a needle to prevent bursting.

Make the syrup and cook the fruit

  1. Boil 1 lb of sugar in 1 pint of water.

  2. Add the fruit and boil until the skin begins to crack.

  3. Remove the fruit and drain on a dish.

  4. Boil the syrup again, adding more sugar if needed.

Jar and store

  1. Once cooled, pour the syrup over the fruit in jars.

  2. Seal the jars tightly and store in a cool, dry place.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

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

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

  4. Sugar + crabtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together407 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).

  5. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, in syrup, helps preserve the fruit by drawing out its water.
Siberian crabs
Supplies the fruit itself, with its tart flavour and skin that cracks when simmered.

The step that matters

Boil the fruit only until the skin begins to crack. Over-boiling softens the flesh and breaks the fruit apart. Sugar syrup then soaks in gradually, so the fruit keeps its shape and firmness.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Limefits about as well
  2. Orangethe original
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Vanillafits less well

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

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesCrab SoupCrab Soup39 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes