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Escalloped Crab Meat

A creamy sauce of butter, milk, flour, cornstarch, and egg yolks is poured over crab meat and baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Escalloped Crab Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour and cornstarch, stirring until well blended.

  3. Gradually pour in the chicken stock and let it boil for 3 minutes.

  4. While stirring constantly, add the milk and bring to a boil again.

  5. Add the beaten egg yolks to the mixture.

Assemble and brown

  1. Cover the bottom of a baking dish with crab meat.

  2. Pour the sauce over the crab meat and sprinkle with grated cheese.

  3. Place under the flame of a gas oven to melt the cheese and brown the top.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Crab + meattop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together448 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).

  3. Butter + cream cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,747 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Butter + crabtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together812 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat, adding richness and a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the sauce together with the cornstarch, giving it body.
Cornstarch
Thickens the sauce quickly and gives it a glossy, smooth texture.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help set the sauce, giving it a custard-like body.
Crab meat
Provides the main flavor and the savory base of the dish.
Cream cheese
Adds creaminess and a tangy richness to the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the beaten egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken when heated but can scramble and turn grainy if the sauce is too hot or boiling. Remove the sauce from direct heat or temper the yolks before adding them to keep it smooth.

“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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