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Craw-Fish Soup

A soup made with crawfish, lobster, mutton, split peas, vegetables, and seasonings, finished with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Craw-Fish Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the shellfish

  1. Boil the crawfish and pick out all the meat, saving it.

  2. Pick out the meat from the lobster and save it as well.

  3. Pound the shells of the crawfish and lobster in a mortar.

Make the soup

  1. Boil the shells in 4 quarts of water with the mutton, split peas, turnip, carrot, onion, mace, cloves, anchovy, thyme, pepper, and salt.

  2. Stew on low heat until the mutton and shells release their flavor.

  3. Strain the mixture through a sieve.

  4. Add the crawfish tails and lobster meat, cut into small pieces, along with the lobster's red coral if available.

  5. Boil for an additional 30 minutes.

Serve

  1. Just before serving, add melted butter.

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. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 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

Mutton
Releases rich meaty flavor into the broth during the long stew.
Green split peas
Break down during simmering to thicken the soup and add body.
Crawfish
Supplies the sweet, shellfish flavor and tender meat of the soup.
Lobster
Adds sweet shellfish flavor and meat, with coral enriching the broth.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Stew on low heat. Gentle simmering draws flavor from the mutton and shells without boiling hard, which can make the broth cloudy and the meat tough.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lobster, mutton, peas, turnip, carrot, onion, clove):

  1. Celeryfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, mutton, peas, turnip, carrot, onion, 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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