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To Make a Crab Pie

A crab pie made by filling a crab shell with boiled crab meat, bread crumbs, butter, pepper, salt, and mace, then baking.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
By F. L. Gillette and Hugo Ziemann · From a historical cookbook (Project Gutenberg) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Crab and pepper work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 922 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

To Make a Crab Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crab

  1. Procure the crabs alive and put them in boiling water with some salt.

  2. Boil them for a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes, according to the size.

  3. When cold, pick the meat from the claws and body.

Fill and bake

  1. Chop all together, and mix it with crumbs of bread, pepper, salt, and a little butter.

  2. Put all this into the shell and brown in a hot oven.

Nutrition, whole recipe (rough)

103Calories
19 gProtein
2 gFat
2 gCarbs

Counts 3 of 4 ingredients. The other 1 aren't in our nutrition table and add nothing above, so the real totals are higher.

What these numbers assume: 3 portions
IngredientPortion assumedkcal
Crab100g cooked97
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 F. L. Gillette and Hugo Ziemann. 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. Crab + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together922 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Mace + crabtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78 recipes

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

Crabs
Provide the main meat that forms the body of the pie filling.
Bread crumbs (in the method)
Absorb moisture and help bind the chopped crab into a cohesive filling.
Butter (in the method)
Adds richness and fat, which keeps the filling moist and helps it brown.
Mace
Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavour to the crab filling.

The step that matters

Boiling the crabs. Boil only until the crabs are just cooked, adjusting for size. Overboiling toughens the proteins in the crab meat, making it dry and stringy in the finished pie.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (crab, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, pepper. 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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