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Stewed Crabs

A stew made with boiled crabs, tomatoes, butter, flour, salt, and paprika.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Stewed Crabs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crabs

  1. Boil the crabs and remove the shells.

  2. Clean the crabs thoroughly, cut the bodies in halves, and crack the claws.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Add the flour to the hot butter and stir until it turns yellow.

  3. Add the canned tomatoes, crabs, and enough water to cover the crabs.

  4. Season with salt and paprika, then cook for 15 minutes.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Crab + flourtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together384 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).

  4. Crab + tomatotop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together100 recipes

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

  5. Tomato + buttertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,918 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and carries flavour into the flour roux.
Canned tomatoes
Provide acidity, moisture and body to the sauce.
Hard-shelled crabs
Supply the main protein and flavour of the dish.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the butter. Flour must be stirred continuously in the hot butter so it cooks evenly into a roux. Undercooked flour tastes raw and does not thicken well, while overcooked flour loses thickening power and can scorch.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Okrafits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

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