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Crab Soup

A soup made with crab meat, fat, tomatoes, onions, garlic, butter, lard, herbs, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Crab Soup

Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Crab Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Open and clean the crabs, removing the gills and sand, then cut them into four parts and extract the meat and fat.

  2. Scald and skin the tomatoes, squeeze out the pulp from the seeds and juice, and chop finely.

  3. Pour boiling water over the seeds and juice, strain, and set aside.

Make the soup

  1. In a soup pot, stew the chopped onion and garlic in butter and lard.

  2. Add the tomatoes and stew for a few minutes.

  3. Incorporate the crab meat from the claws, then add the crabs and the fat from the shells.

  4. Sift grated bread or crackers over the mixture and season with salt, pepper, parsley, marjoram, thyme, lemon juice, and lemon peel.

  5. Pour in the reserved water from the seeds and boil moderately for one hour.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Tomato + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  5. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Crabs
Provide the main meat and rich fat that flavour the soup.
Tomatoes
Add acidity, body and fresh flavour as they break down during stewing.
Onion
Builds a sweet, savoury base when softened slowly in fat.
Grated bread or crackers
Sifted in to thicken the soup slightly by absorbing liquid.
Butter and lard
Provide fat for stewing the aromatics and carry flavour through the soup.

The step that matters

Boil moderately for one hour. A gentle, steady simmer extracts flavour from the crab and shells without breaking the mixture apart or over-reducing it.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (crab, tomato, onion, garlic, butter, bread, pepper):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, tomato, onion, garlic, butter, bread, pepper. 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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