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Crab Meat Chops

Crab meat chops are fried patties made with crab meat, parsley, onion, white sauce, and spices, served with tartare or hollandaise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Crab Meat Chops

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Make a thick white sauce and mix it with the crab meat, parsley, onion, salt, and cayenne pepper.

  2. Cook the mixture together and let it cool.

  3. Form the mixture into 8 separate heaps and let them stand for an hour.

Shape and fry

  1. Shape each heap into a chop shape, dip in the beaten egg, and dredge in cracker dust.

  2. Fry in hot oil until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Serve with hot Tartare sauce or Hollandaise 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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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 and flavour of the chops.
Thick white sauce
Binds the crab meat together and keeps the mixture moist.
Beaten egg
Coats the chops so the cracker dust adheres before frying.
Cracker dust
Forms a crisp, golden browned crust when fried.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool and stand before shaping. A warm, loose mixture is soft and sticky, so the heaps can fall apart. Cooling and resting let the white sauce thicken and firm, so the chops hold their shape through dipping and frying.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (crab, meat, parsley, sauce, pepper, egg):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, meat, parsley, sauce, pepper, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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