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Crab Salad

This recipe uses a raw egg yolk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Tarragon and garden cress share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 23 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Crab Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Remove the meat from the claws and breastplate of the crab and shred it.

  2. In a bowl, mix one-third of the crab meat with the liver and cream from the back.

  3. In another bowl, combine mustard, salt, white pepper, chives, and hard-boiled yolks.

  4. Add salad oil and mix to a paste with a wooden spoon.

  5. Incorporate the raw egg yolk and gradually add more oil until you have about 1 cup of sauce.

  6. Finish with tarragon vinegar and strain the sauce.

  7. Fill a round mold with aspic jelly, layering with egg yolks, green butter balls, and olives.

  8. Turn out the mold and fill the center with the dressed crab, topping with the reserved shredded meat.

  9. Garnish with garden cress and lettuce leaves, serving the remaining sauce on the side.

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. Tarragon + garden cresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together23 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Mustard + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together901 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Mustard + garden cresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together18 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Chive + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together589 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Mustard + chivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together587 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (crab, mustard, chive, egg, tarragon, vinegar, garden cress):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, mustard, chive, egg, tarragon, vinegar, garden cress. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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