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Hot Crab

Crab meat mixed with breadcrumbs, spices, gravy, and cream, served hot on toast with lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Hot Crab

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crab

  1. Remove the meat from the crab shell and place it in a mortar.

  2. Beat the crab meat until smooth.

Make the mixture

  1. Add bread crumbs, pepper, nutmeg, strong gravy, and cream; mix well.

  2. Warm the mixture gently.

Serve

  1. Serve it on hot toast with plenty of lemon juice squeezed over it.

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

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

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  4. Crab + meattop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together448 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).

  5. Crab + creamtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together317 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetoin (butter, cream).

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

What each ingredient does

Crab meat
Forms the main body of the spread and gives it its flavour.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and thicken the mixture so it holds together on toast.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, softening the texture of the spread.
Strong gravy
Adds savoury depth and salt-based flavour to the crab mixture.

The step that matters

Warm the mixture gently. High heat can toughen the proteins in crab meat and cause the cream to separate or curdle. Gentle heat keeps the spread smooth and tender.

“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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