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To Cook Crabs

A dish of crabs mixed with soda crackers, butter, egg, and seasonings, formed into cakes and fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Crab and butter work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 812 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

To Cook Crabs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a bowl, combine the picked crabs, rolled soda crackers, melted butter, beaten egg, pepper, and salt, and stir until well combined.

  2. Form the mixture into cakes.

Cook

  1. Fry the cakes in hot lard until golden brown.

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. Crab + buttertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together812 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Crab + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together922 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Crab + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together467 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Picked crabs
Provides the main body and flavor of the cakes.
Rolled soda crackers
Bind the mixture and absorb moisture so the cakes hold their shape.
Beaten egg
Binds the ingredients together and helps the cakes set when cooked.
Melted butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavor and aids browning.
Lard for frying
Conducts heat to brown the outside of the cakes and adds fat.

The step that matters

Fry the cakes in hot lard until golden brown. The cakes are delicate and can fall apart or absorb excess fat if the lard is not hot enough. Enough heat sets the egg and browns the outside quickly while the inside warms through.

“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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