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Crab Sausages

Crab sausages are fried crab meat patties bound with egg yolks and herbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Chervil and chive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 370 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Crab Sausages

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. In a bowl, combine cooked crab meat, chervil, minced garlic, coarse sea salt, red pepper, and minced chives.

  2. Pound the mixture and rub it through a sieve.

  3. Add raw egg yolks to bind the mixture.

Shape and cook

  1. Shape the mixture into sausage forms and roll in flour.

  2. Fry in butter until golden brown.

  3. Serve with tartar sauce.

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. Chervil + chivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together370 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Garlic + chivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,149 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Chervil + garlictop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together271 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cooked crab meat
Provides the main flavour and the bulk of the sausage filling.
Raw egg yolks
Bind the mixture so the sausages hold their shape when fried.
Flour
Coats the shaped sausages, helping them brown evenly and form a crisp surface.
Butter
Fries the sausages, adding browning and a rich flavour to the outside.

The step that matters

Rub the mixture through a sieve. Pounding and sieving breaks the crab into a fine, smooth paste. A coarse texture can make the sausages crumble when shaped and fried.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (crab, meat, chervil, garlic, pepper, chive, egg):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, meat, chervil, garlic, pepper, chive, egg. 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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