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Jelly of Siberian Crabs

A jelly made from the juice of boiled Siberian crabs and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Crab and sugar work together. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 407 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells grass, green. The science ↓

Jelly of Siberian Crabs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Remove the stalks from the crabs, then wash and weigh them.

  2. In a pot, add 1 pint of water for every 1.5 pounds of crabs and boil gently until the crabs are broken but not pulpy.

  3. Pour the mixture into a jelly bag and let the juice drain until it is clear and transparent.

Make the jelly

  1. Weigh the juice and pour it into a clean preserving pan.

  2. Boil the juice quickly for 15 minutes.

  3. Stir in 0.75 pound of sugar until dissolved, then boil the jelly for an additional 15 to 20 minutes.

  4. Skim the jelly clean and pour it into molds.

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 + 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

Crabs
Provide the fruit and natural pectin that gives the jelly its set and flavour.
Fine sugar
Adds sweetness and, with boiling, helps the juice thicken into a firm jelly.

The step that matters

Boiling the juice after adding the sugar. Sugar must dissolve fully before the final boil, and the jelly must reach a proper boil for the set to form. Boiling too briefly leaves it runny; boiling too long can make it stiff or dull.

“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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