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Transcendent Crab-apple Jelly

A jelly made from crab apples, water, soda, sugar, and optional flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Crab and almond work together. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 24 recipes. Both carry 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine, which smells cocoa, roasted. The science ↓

Transcendent Crab-apple Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Sprinkle crab-apples with soda and pour hot water over them. Let stand briefly and stir.

  2. Drain and place crab-apples in a pot with just enough water to cover.

  3. Boil until soft.

Make the jelly

  1. Dip out the juice and strain through a jelly bag without squeezing.

  2. For every pint of juice, add a pint of sugar.

  3. Boil for 8-10 minutes.

  4. Test the jelly by dropping it on a saucer and chilling; it should remain rounded if done.

Variations

  1. If using cultivated wild plums, skip the soda and follow the same steps.

  2. For marmalade, press the leftover plums through a sieve, then mix with an equal amount of sugar and boil for 10-15 minutes.

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. Crab + almondtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).

  2. Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

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

  3. Crab + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked 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

Crab-apples
Provide the fruit whose natural pectin and acid set the jelly.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and helps it set into a firm gel.
Soda
Softens the fruit skins before boiling so the fruit breaks down.

The step that matters

Jelly test on a saucer. Boiling must reach the point where the juice sets when cooled. Underboiling leaves a runny jelly, while overboiling can make it stiff or cloudy. A cold saucer test shows whether the gel has formed.

Swap the almond

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

  1. Almondthe original
  2. Beansfits about as well
  3. Chestnutfits less well
  4. Sesamefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, sugar. 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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