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Deviled Crabs

A dish of boiled crab meat stuffed into shells, seasoned with cream, butter, parsley, cayenne, lemon, and egg yolks, then fried or baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Deviled Crabs

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the crab

  1. Boil the crabs alive for a few minutes.

  2. Cool the crabs and remove the meat.

Make the filling

  1. Heat the cream in a double boiler. Add the butter once the cream is hot.

  2. Stir in the crab meat, parsley, salt, cayenne, lemon juice, and mashed egg yolks.

  3. Fill the cleaned and dried crab shells with the mixture, packing it tightly.

Coat and cook

  1. Baste the filled shells with the beaten egg yolk.

  2. Sprinkle the shells with bread crumbs.

  3. Fry the shells in deep boiling fat for 2 minutes, cooking only 2 at a time. Omit the egg if frying is not convenient.

  4. Pour melted butter over the shells.

  5. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 5 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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Crabs
Provide the main meat that forms the filling.
Cream
Makes the filling smooth and moist once heated with butter.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the filling a soft, silky texture.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Bind the filling and add richness and body.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, browned crust over the filled shells.

The step that matters

Fry the shells in small batches. Frying only 2 shells at a time keeps the fat hot, so the coating crisps quickly rather than soaking up oil and turning greasy while the filling heats 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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