Skip to main content
Main

Craw-Fish Soup

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 shells

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

  2. 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 is tender.

  3. Strain the mixture through a sieve.

  4. Add the crawfish tails and lobster meat in small pieces; boil for 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
Provides rich meat flavour and body to the broth as it stews.
Green split peas
Break down during stewing to thicken the soup and add body.
Crawfish
Supply the main shellfish flavour from the shells and the tail meat.
Lobster
Adds sweet shellfish flavour from its shells and meat.
Turnip
Contributes mild sweetness and body to the broth as it cooks.
Anchovy
Adds savory depth to the broth, usually without a fishy taste.

The step that matters

Stew on low heat until the mutton is tender. Gentle heat lets collagen in the mutton break down slowly into gelatin, giving tender meat and a silky body. Boiling hard can toughen the meat and cloud the broth.

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.

You might also like

Mutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesGreen PeasGreen Peas229 recipesLobster SauceLobster Sauce174 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipes