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Martha Washington Crab Soup

A crab soup made with boiled corned pork stock, crab meat, milk, egg yolks, salt, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Crab and meat 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 ↓

Martha Washington Crab Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Boil the corned pork in 2 quarts of water for 1 hour.

  2. Let the stock cool completely.

  3. Skim off the fat from the stock.

  4. Reheat the stock.

  5. Add the crab meat to the stock and cook for 30 minutes.

Make the custard

  1. Heat the milk in a separate saucepan.

  2. Remove the milk from heat.

  3. Gradually pour the hot milk onto the beaten egg yolks, stirring constantly.

  4. Combine the milk mixture with the crab and stock in a bowl.

  5. Season with salt and cayenne to taste.

  6. Set the bowl in boiling water for 5 minutes 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. Crab + meattop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together448 recipes

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

  2. Meat + porktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,208 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Pork + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,386 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  4. Crab + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together922 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Pork + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,121 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

Crab meat
Provides the main flavour and the tender pieces of seafood that make up the soup.
Egg yolks
Thicken the soup and add richness when gently heated with the milk.
Milk
Adds creaminess and body, softening the broth's savouriness.
Corned pork
Lends salty, savoury depth to the stock that the soup is built on.

The step that matters

Adding the hot milk to the egg yolks. Pouring hot milk into the yolks too quickly can scramble them. Adding it gradually while stirring constantly gently raises the yolks' temperature so they thicken the soup 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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