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Soft Shell Crabs

Soft shell crabs are cleaned, seasoned, coated in egg and breadcrumbs, then fried and served with tartar sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Crab and sauce work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 238 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Soft Shell Crabs

Ingredients

Directions

Clean the crabs

  1. Lift each point of the back shell and remove the spongy substance beneath it.

  2. Turn the crab on its back and remove the dark, soft shell piece called the 'apron' and any remaining spongy substance.

  3. Wash the crabs in cold water and dry them carefully on a towel.

Bread and fry

  1. Season the crabs with salt and pepper.

  2. Dip each crab in egg and roll in breadcrumbs.

  3. Fry the crabs in very hot oil for about three minutes, cooking only two at a time.

Serve

  1. Serve with tartar sauce.

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 + saucetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together238 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

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

  4. Pepper + saucetop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,303 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Pepper + eggtop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Pepper and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,303 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

Soft shell crabs
Main ingredient; the whole soft-bodied crab becomes crisp and edible when fried.
Egg
Binds the breadcrumbs so they adhere to the crab during frying.
Breadcrumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating that browns quickly in hot oil.

The step that matters

Fry in very hot oil, two crabs at a time. Very hot oil crisps the breadcrumb coating quickly before the crab overcooks and absorbs grease. Crowding the pan drops the oil temperature, which leads to soggy, greasy coating.

“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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