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Crab Ravigote

A crab dish served with a thick remoulade sauce, mayonnaise, anchovies, pickles, parsley, lemon, and malt vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Capers and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 624 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Crab Ravigote

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crab

  1. Boil the crabs and set aside to cool, then pick the meat.

  2. Mix the crab meat with thick Remoulade sauce and fill the shell.

Dress and serve

  1. Cover the meat with mayonnaise and decorate with anchovy fillets and sliced pickles.

  2. Serve with a sprig of parsley and sliced lemon.

Make the Remoulade sauce

  1. For the Remoulade sauce, mix chopped anchovies, chopped parsley, mustard, salt, pepper, scraped garlic, salad oil, and malt vinegar in a bowl.

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. Capers + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together624 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Parsley + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Sauce + anchovytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Crabs
Provide the main meat, which is picked from the shell and bound with sauce.
Mayonnaise
Adds richness and moisture, covering the meat with a creamy layer.
Mustard
Adds sharp flavour that balances the richness of the oil and mayonnaise.
Salad oil
Forms the emulsified base of the sauce, adding fat and a smooth texture.
Malt vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and cuts through the richness.

The step that matters

Mix the Remoulade sauce. Oil and vinegar must be combined slowly and thoroughly so the sauce emulsifies into a smooth, cohesive dressing rather than separating into greasy layers.

“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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