Skip to main content
Main

Crab Curry

A simple crab curry made with onion, curry powder, lemon juice, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Onion and crab work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 311 recipes. Both carry acetoin, which smells butter, cream. The science ↓

Crab Curry

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curry

  1. In a pan, sauté the chopped onion until soft.

  2. Add the curry powder and cook for 1-2 minutes.

  3. Stir in the crab pieces and let it stew for about 20 minutes.

  4. Add the lemon juice and salt to taste.

Serve

  1. Serve hot.

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. Onion + crabtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together311 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetoin (butter, cream).

  2. Crab + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together387 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Onion + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Onion
Softens and sweetens as it cooks, forming the flavour base of the curry.
Curry powder
Blooms in the hot pan to release aromatic spice compounds that flavour the dish.
Crab
Provides the main protein and its sweet, rich flavour, which stews into the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich curry and balances its flavours.

The step that matters

Adding the curry powder. Cooking curry powder briefly in the hot pan, rather than adding it to liquid, helps its fat-soluble aroma compounds release and bloom. Stir constantly so it does not scorch and turn bitter.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, crab):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Coconutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, crab. 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesCrab SoupCrab Soup39 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes