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Savoury Crab with Tomato Sauce

A crab dish simmered with tomato sauce, breadcrumbs, lemon, and wine, finished with butter and garnished with croutons and lemon rings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Savoury Crab with Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine crab meat, breadcrumbs, tomato sauce, lemon juice, lemon rind, salt, and pepper in a stewpan.

  2. Add Chablis or sherry and simmer over low heat for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

  3. Stir in fresh butter and bring to a boil.

  4. Transfer to a deep dish and garnish with fried bread croutons and lemon rings before serving.

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Tomato + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,592 recipes

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

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 dish and supplies its savoury, delicate flavour.
Breadcrumbs
Soak up liquid and help thicken the mixture into a soft, spoonable texture.
Tomato sauce
Adds moisture, acidity and body to the sauce.
Chablis or sherry
Adds acidity and aroma, and its alcohol carries flavour as it simmers.
Butter
Adds richness and a glossy finish to the sauce.

The step that matters

Simmering with the wine. Simmering gently over low heat for the full 10 minutes lets the alcohol cook off and the flavours meld, while stirring prevents the breadcrumbs and tomato from sticking and scorching on the base of the stewpan.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (crab, meat, tomato, sauce, pepper, sherry, butter):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Avocadofits about as well
  4. Grapefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, meat, tomato, sauce, pepper, sherry, butter. 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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