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Broiled Soft-shell Crabs

Broiled soft-shell crabs coated in butter, lemon, cayenne, salt, and flour, served with tartare sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Broiled Soft-shell Crabs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Melt the butter in a deep platter.

  2. Mix in the lemon juice and cayenne pepper.

  3. Sprinkle salt on the cleaned crabs.

  4. Roll the crabs in the butter mixture, then drain briefly.

  5. Dredge the crabs well with salted flour.

Cook and serve

  1. Cook in an oyster broiler over clear coals.

  2. Serve with sauce tartare.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Carries the seasoning and adds richness, helping the coating brown and taste rich.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the buttery coating and balances its richness.
Flour
Forms a dry coating that crisps and browns under the broiler's direct heat.

The step that matters

Cook in an oyster broiler over clear coals. Direct, intense heat can scorch the butter solids and flour coating before the crab cooks through. Watch the color and move the crabs away from the hottest spots if browning too fast.

“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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