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Soup

To Make Craw-Fish Soup

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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 ↓

To Make Craw-Fish Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the crawfish and lobster, then pick out all the meat and set aside.

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

Make the soup

  1. In a pot, combine the shells, water, mutton, split peas, turnip, carrot, onion, mace, cloves, anchovy, thyme, pepper, and salt.

  2. Stew on low heat until the flavors are extracted from the mutton and shells.

  3. Strain the mixture, then add the crawfish tails and lobster meat in small pieces.

  4. Boil for an additional 30 minutes before serving.

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 and body into the broth during slow stewing.
Green split peas
Break down during stewing to thicken the broth and add body.
Crawfish shells
Extract shellfish aroma and flavor into the stock when pounded and stewed.
Lobster shell
Adds concentrated shellfish flavor to the stock during stewing.
Turnip
Contributes earthy sweetness and body as it softens in the broth.
Anchovy
Adds savory depth and umami to the broth.

The step that matters

Stew on low heat. Gentle, slow simmering extracts flavor from the mutton and shells without making the broth cloudy or greasy. Boiling hard can emulsify fats and break down the stock too quickly.

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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