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To Preserve Siberian Crabs

A method for preserving Siberian crabs by boiling them in a cinnamon, ginger, and clove syrup with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

To Preserve Siberian Crabs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil water with cinnamon, ginger, and cloves until the flavor is extracted.

  2. Strain the mixture and boil it with the sugar for 10 minutes.

  3. Let the syrup cool, then add the crabs and heat them in the syrup until scalding hot.

Cook the crabs

  1. Remove from heat and let cool nearly, then heat them in the same manner three times.

  2. If the crabs look clear, carefully remove them and place them in a jar.

  3. Continue boiling the remaining crabs until they are quite clear.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Cinnamon + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Ginger + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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 crabs
Provide the tart fruit that is cooked until tender and clear in the syrup.
Pounded loaf sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps preserve the fruit by drawing out moisture.

The step that matters

Heating the crabs in the syrup until they look clear. Repeated gentle heating lets the syrup slowly replace the fruit's water, so the crabs turn clear and firm. Boiling too hard or too long can break the fruit apart and make the syrup cloudy.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Clovethe original
  3. Allspicefits about as well
  4. Cardamomfits less well

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