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Dessert

Preserved Crab-apples

Preserved crab-apples are crab apples boiled, sugared, and jarred with lemon juice.

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

Preserved Crab-apples

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Select nearly perfect crab-apples, leaving the stems on.

  2. Place them in a pot and cover with warm water.

  3. Heat to boiling, then simmer until the skins break.

  4. Drain and skin the apples, then remove the cores through the blossom ends.

  5. Weigh the apples; for each pound, use 1¼ pounds of sugar and 1 cup of water.

Make the syrup and cook the apples

  1. Boil the water and sugar until the scum ceases to rise.

  2. Add the fruit, cover, and simmer until the apples are clear red and tender.

  3. Remove with a skimmer and cool on dishes.

  4. Add the juice of 1 lemon for every 3 pounds of fruit to the syrup and boil until clear and rich.

Jar

  1. Fill jars three-quarters full with apples, pour in the syrup, and seal when cool.

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

Siberian crab-apples
Provide the main fruit, whose natural pectin and acidity help the preserve set and keep its tartness.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, dissolved into syrup, preserves it by drawing out water.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps keep the syrup clear and the fruit firm.

The step that matters

Simmer the apples gently until just tender. Boiling hard or overcooking breaks down the fruit and makes it mushy. Gentle simmering lets the sugar syrup penetrate while the apples keep their shape and clear red colour.

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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