Skip to main content
Baking

Devilled Crabs

Devilled crabs are crab meat mixed with cream, flour, butter, egg, parsley, nutmeg, salt, and cayenne, stuffed into shells and baked or fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Devilled Crabs

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.

Prepare the filling

  1. Remove the meat from the crabs.

  2. Scald the cream in a saucepan.

  3. Stir in the flour rubbed with butter and cook for several minutes.

  4. Remove from heat and stir in the crab meat, mashed egg, parsley, nutmeg, salt, and cayenne.

Fill and bake

  1. Clean the crab shells and fill them with the mixture.

  2. Brush the tops with beaten egg and sprinkle with bread crumbs.

  3. Brown in the oven at 400°F (200°C) or fry in boiling fat.

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

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

  2. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  3. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  4. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Crabs
Their meat forms the main body of the filling.
Cream
Scalded with flour, it thickens into a rich, binding sauce.
Flour
Cooked with butter, it thickens the cream into a stable base.
Hard boiled egg
Mashed into the filling, it helps bind and firm the mixture.
Butter
Rubbed into the flour, it adds richness and helps form a smooth roux.

The step that matters

Cook the flour and butter with the cream. Cooking the flour for several minutes removes its raw taste and fully thickens the cream. If the sauce stays thin, the filling will be loose and may not hold in the shells.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (crab, cream, flour, butter, egg, nutmeg, pepper):

  1. Cinnamonfits about as well
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Tarragonfits about as well
  4. Capersfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, cream, flour, butter, egg, nutmeg, 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.

You might also like

Delicate CakeDelicate Cake246 recipesBoiled FrostingBoiled Frosting69 recipesCitron CakeCitron Cake68 recipesScotch CakeScotch Cake63 recipes