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Sauce

Crawfish Butter

A creamy sauce made from crawfish butter, anchovies, egg yolks, garlic, mayonnaise, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Crawfish Butter

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pound the anchovies with the egg yolks and garlic until smooth.

  2. Mix in the crawfish butter, salt, mayonnaise sauce, and nutmeg.

  3. Gradually add the sweet oil and tarragon vinegar, mixing well.

  4. Add a little vegetable red to achieve a light rose color.

  5. Pass the mixture through a fine sieve and place in a small tureen on ice.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Nutmeg + tarragontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together213 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Clove + tarragontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together548 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Tarragon + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,547 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Garlic + tarragontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together884 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Hard-boiled egg yolks
Emulsify with the oil and vinegar to give the butter a smooth, rich body.
Crawfish butter
Adds its own fat and rich flavor, giving the butter its main character.
Sweet oil
Supplies fat that, emulsified with the yolks, makes the mixture thick and spreadable.
Anchovies
Contribute a salty, savory depth that rounds out the richness.
Tarragon vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the rich fats and balances the flavor.

The step that matters

Gradually add the sweet oil and tarragon vinegar, mixing well.. Oil added too quickly to the yolk mixture can separate instead of forming a stable emulsion. Adding it slowly while mixing lets the yolk lecithin disperse the oil into tiny droplets, keeping the butter smooth and thick.

Swap the garlic

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, egg, clove, sauce, nutmeg, tarragon, vinegar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Garlicthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, egg, clove, sauce, nutmeg, tarragon, vinegar. 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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