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Spiced Crabapple Jelly

A jelly made from wild plums and crabapples, sweetened with sugar and spiced with cinnamon and cloves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Spiced Crabapple Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the fruit

  1. Combine wild plums and crabapples in a pot.

  2. Add sugar, cinnamon, and cloves.

  3. Cook until the fruit is soft.

Strain and jar

  1. Strain the mixture carefully to remove solids.

  2. Pour the jelly into sterilized jars.

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. Plum + cinnamontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together513 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Plum + clovetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together446 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Plum + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,313 recipes

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

Sugar and cinnamon 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

Crabapples
Provide natural pectin and tartness, which help the jelly set.
Wild plums
Add fruit flavor, natural pectin, and tartness to support the set.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pectin form a firm gel while preserving the jelly.

The step that matters

Strain the mixture carefully to remove solids. Pressing or squeezing the cooked fruit forces small solids and pulp through the strainer, which makes the finished jelly cloudy. Letting the juice drip through on its own gives a clearer, more transparent jelly.

Swap the plum

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Quincefits better
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cinnamon, clove. 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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