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Crab-apple Jelly

Crab-apple jelly is a preserve made by cooking crab-apples with water, sugar, and lemon juice.

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 ↓

Crab-apple Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Quarter the crab-apples and remove any black spots from the cores.

  2. Place the apples in a preserving kettle with 1 teacup of water to prevent burning.

  3. Add more water as it evaporates while cooking.

  4. Boil the apples until they become a pulp, then strain through a coarse flannel.

Make the jelly

  1. Proceed as you would for currant jelly, adding 1 pound of sugar for each pint of juice.

  2. Heat the sugar until very hot, then add it to the juice after it has boiled for twenty minutes.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil and remove from heat immediately.

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

Crab-apples
Provide the pectin and tart acid that let the juice set into jelly.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and helps it set firm and hold its shape.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens flavour and supports good setting.

The step that matters

Adding the hot sugar to the boiling juice. Sugar must dissolve fully and the juice must be boiling so the mixture reaches the concentration needed to set. Adding sugar to cold or under-boiled juice can leave grains or a runny jelly.

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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