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Dessert

Crab Butter

Crab butter is a mixture of crab meat and butter, simmered with water and strained.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Meat and crab work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 448 recipes. Both carry 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine, which smells cocoa, roasted. The science ↓

Crab Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the meat from the claws of the crabs and bruise it in a mortar.

  2. Mix the crab meat with the fresh butter.

Cook and strain

  1. Place the mixture in a saucepan with the water and simmer while stirring gently.

  2. When it is about to boil, remove it from the heat and press it through a sieve into a basin.

Cool

  1. Place the basin in cold water until the butter cools.

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. Meat + crabtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together448 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Meat + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Crab claw meat
Provides the main flavour and the savoury, shellfish character of the butter.
Fresh butter
Carries the crab flavour and sets firm as it cools, giving the butter its body.
Water
Helps the mixture heat gently and keeps the butter from scorching while it simmers.

The step that matters

Stop the heat before it boils. Butter that boils can separate and turn greasy or scorched, and the milk solids burn quickly. Removing the pan as it nears boiling keeps the emulsion smooth before straining.

“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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