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Soups, Broths, Purges

A creamy crayfish soup with rice, butter, anchovy sauce, bay leaf, cayenne, stock, cream, sherry, and fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Soups, Broths, Purges

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Shell the crayfish and remove the gut from the tail, keeping the tail whole.

  2. Boil the rice in water for 30 minutes until soft.

  3. Pound the shells with butter and rice.

Make the soup

  1. Add the shells, butter, and rice to a saucepan with anchovy sauce, bay leaf, cayenne, and stock.

  2. Simmer for 3 hours.

  3. Pound the meat from the crayfish (except the tails) and add it to the soup.

  4. Simmer the soup.

  5. Add the fish for 1-2 minutes.

  6. Strain through a sieve.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in ¼ pint of boiled cream and salt to taste.

  2. Add the crayfish tails.

  3. Warm the soup thoroughly without boiling.

  4. Add sherry.

  5. Serve with well-drained fried bread cut into dice.

  6. If the soup is not bright scarlet, add lobster butter for color.

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

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Crayfish + anchovytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together61 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Anchovy + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,260 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanol (green, fruity).

  5. Crayfish + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together343 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

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

What each ingredient does

Crayfish
Provides the main flavor and the tender meat and tails that make up the soup.
Rice
Thickens the soup as it cooks down, giving it body.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries the shell flavor into the soup.
Boiled cream
Adds smoothness and richness to the finished soup.
Anchovy sauce
Adds a salty, savory depth to the broth.

The step that matters

Warm the soup thoroughly without boiling. Once cream is added, boiling can cause it to separate and turn grainy, and it can toughen the delicate crayfish tails. Gentle heat keeps the soup 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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