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Potted Crayfish

Potted Crayfish is a dish of boiled crayfish meat mashed into a paste with mace, pepper, salt, and butter, served in small pots.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
By Isabella Beeton · From a historical cookbook (Project Gutenberg) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,257 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Potted Crayfish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Boil the fish in salt and water.

  2. Pick out all the meat and pound it in a mortar to a paste.

  3. While pounding, add the butter gradually and mix in the spice and seasoning.

Pot and seal

  1. Put the paste in small pots.

  2. Pour clarified butter over, carefully excluding the air.

Nutrition, whole recipe (rough)

6Calories
0 gProtein
0 gFat
2 gCarbs

Counts 2 of 3 ingredients. The other 1 aren't in our nutrition table and add nothing above, so the real totals are higher.

What these numbers assume: 2 portions
IngredientPortion assumedkcal
Black Pepper1 tsp ground (2.3g)6
Salt1 tsp (6g)0
Macenot in our table0

One typical portion per ingredient; the recipe's quantities are not counted. A rough guide only, not for medical or dietary planning.

By Isabella Beeton. Recipe from a historical cookbook (Project Gutenberg).

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. See the original page.

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. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Mace
Adds a warm, aromatic flavour to the paste.
Pepper
Adds a sharp, pungent note that balances the richness of the butter.

The step that matters

Pouring the clarified butter over the paste. The butter layer must fully cover the paste with no air gaps. Air exposure lets fats oxidise and encourages microbial growth, so the seal is what keeps the potted meat fresh.

“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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