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Deviled Crab Meat

A creamy crab mixture seasoned with butter, flour, milk, parsley, onions, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Deviled Crab Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a suitable kettle.

  2. Add the flour and mix well.

  3. Gradually add the milk while stirring constantly until it reaches a boil.

  4. Stir in the salt, parsley, onions, white pepper, and red pepper.

Pack and process

  1. Add enough crab meat to create a mixture that can be packed into shells.

  2. Pack the mixture into cans while hot and process as you would for crab meat.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Butter + crabtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together812 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds fat and richness, and carries flavour into the base.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a stable white sauce that holds the crab together.
Fresh milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, giving body and creaminess when it boils.
Crab meat
Supplies the main protein and texture, bound by the sauce into a packable mixture.

The step that matters

Stirring the milk in while it heats. Adding milk gradually while stirring constantly keeps the flour dispersed, preventing lumps and a grainy sauce before it thickens at a boil.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, milk, parsley, onion, pepper, crab):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, milk, parsley, onion, pepper, crab. 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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