Why it works: Crayfish and butter work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 343 recipes. Both carry anethole, which smells sweet, anise. The science ↓
Crayfish Butter
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the shells
Remove the tails from the crayfish and finely pound the shells.
Make the butter
Mix the pounded shells with 3 ounces of butter.
Rub the mixture through a fine sieve.
Add a little cochineal for color.
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.
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Crayfish + buttertop 11% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together343 recipes
Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Crayfish shells
- Provide the flavor and reddish color base for the butter.
- Butter
- Carries the shell flavor and gives the finished butter its rich, spreadable body.
The step that matters
Rub the mixture through a fine sieve. Pounded shells leave hard, gritty fragments. Pressing the mixture through a fine sieve removes them, so the butter spreads smoothly.
“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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