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To Dress Crab

A crab dish flavored with butter, shallots, parsley, herbs, broth, bread, sherry, lemon, cayenne, and baked with breadcrumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Dress Crab

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the filling

  1. Melt the butter and sauté the shallots and parsley until soft.

  2. Add the sweet herbs and broth or water, and boil for a few minutes.

  3. Remove the herbs.

  4. Stir in the grated roll, sweet oil, sherry, lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and salt.

  5. Add the crab to warm it through.

Bake and serve

  1. Fill the crab shell with the mixture.

  2. Sprinkle with additional bread crumbs.

  3. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) for a few minutes until browned.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Crab (in the method)
Forms the main body of the dish, giving the filling its flavor and substance.
Roll
Grated bread absorbs liquid and helps bind the filling so it holds together.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps soften the shallots without browning them.
Shallots
Add mild onion-like sweetness and aroma as they soften in the butter.
Sherry
Adds acidity and aromatic depth to the filling.

The step that matters

Bake until just browned. The crab is already cooked and only needs warming, so a short bake is enough. Overbaking dries the bread crumbs and toughens the crab, while too little heat leaves the top pale.

Swap the shallot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, butter, sherry, lemon, pepper):

  1. Carrotfits about as well
  2. Shallotthe original
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Spinachfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, butter, sherry, lemon, 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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