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Crab Soup

A creamy soup made with crab meat, milk, cream, butter, onions, salt, and paprika.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Crab Soup

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Crab Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a double boiler, combine the milk and cream, and bring to a boil.

  2. In a separate bowl, rub the butter with 1 tablespoon of flour and mix in the chopped onions.

Make the soup

  1. Once the milk and cream are boiling, add the crab meat and pepper, and boil for 10 to 15 minutes.

  2. Add salt before removing from heat.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Crab + creamtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together317 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetoin (butter, cream).

  4. Crab + buttertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together812 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Crab + oniontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together311 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetoin (butter, cream).

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

What each ingredient does

Crabs
Provides the main seafood flavor and the tender meat of the soup.
Milk
Forms the creamy liquid base that the soup is built on.
Cream
Adds richness and body through its fat content.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and with flour helps lightly thicken the soup.
Onions
Adds a mild aromatic savoriness to the base.

The step that matters

Boiling the crab in the milk and cream. Milk and cream scorch or boil over easily when heated hard. Keeping the double boiler steady protects the dairy from scorching and separating, so the soup stays smooth and creamy while the crab cooks.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (crab, milk, cream, butter):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Onionthe original
  3. Asparagusfits about as well
  4. Capsicumfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, milk, cream, butter. 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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