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Devilled Crab

A crab dish with eggs, bread crumbs, lemon, sherry, pepper, and butter, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Devilled Crab

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Remove the meat from the crab and mix it with the chopped eggs, bread crumbs, lemon juice, sherry, pepper, and salt.

  2. In a saucepan, melt the butter, add flour to thicken, and gradually stir in milk until smooth.

  3. Season the mixture with mustard and mace, then combine it with the crab mixture.

Bake and serve

  1. Transfer to a baking dish, sift additional bread crumbs on top, and dot with bits of butter.

  2. Heat in a 400°F (200°C) oven until golden and bubbly.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Crab + buttertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together812 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Crab
Provides the main body and flavour of the filling.
Hard boiled eggs
Add richness and body to the crab mixture.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and give the filling a softer, bound texture.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the topping brown in the oven.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth sauce that binds the filling.
Milk
Forms a creamy base that keeps the filling moist.

The step that matters

Thickening the milk sauce. Flour must be cooked into the melted butter and milk added gradually while stirring, otherwise lumps form and the sauce does not thicken evenly.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (crab, egg, bread, sherry, pepper, butter, flour):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Plumfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, egg, bread, sherry, pepper, butter, flour. 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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