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Crab Cocktail

A chilled crab salad with peppers, horseradish, lemon, vinegar, olive oil, paprika, mustard, and salt, served in glasses.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Horseradish and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Crab Cocktail

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crab

  1. Remove any small pieces of shell from the crab meat.

Make the cocktail

  1. In a bowl, combine the crab meat, chopped green pepper, pimento, and red pepper.

  2. Add the horseradish, lemon juice, vinegar, olive oil, paprika, dry mustard, and salt; mix well.

Serve

  1. Serve in high sherbet glasses, garnished with sprigs of parsley and sliced pimentos.

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. Horseradish + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Lemon + olivetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,922 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

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 cocktail and provides its delicate seafood flavor.
Prepared horseradish
Adds sharp heat that cuts through the richness of the crab.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavors and balances the seasoning.
Vinegar
Adds further acidity, giving the dressing a tangy edge.
Olive oil
Adds fat that gives the dressing a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Red pepper
Adds sweetness and crisp texture to the mixture.

The step that matters

Remove the shell pieces from the crab meat. Tiny fragments of shell are hard to see and can be bitten into by mistake, so the meat should be checked carefully before it is mixed with other ingredients.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (crab, meat, pepper, horseradish, vinegar, olive, mustard):

  1. Avocadofits about as well
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Cherryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, meat, pepper, horseradish, vinegar, olive, mustard. 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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