Skip to main content
Main

Boiled Crabs

Boiled crabs served with butter and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Boiled Crabs

Ingredients

Directions

Boil and prepare

  1. Boil crabs in salted water for about 15 minutes.

  2. Remove crabs, wipe off, and rub the shells with butter.

  3. Take off the small claws and place them in a dish covered with a napkin.

  4. Remove the meat from the crabs.

Make and serve

  1. For each cup of crab meat, mix in ⅓ cup lemon juice, ½ cup melted butter, a pinch of cayenne pepper, and salt to taste.

  2. Mix well and replace the mixture in the shells to serve.

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Crab + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together387 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

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

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 that forms the body of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and giving the meat a smooth texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and sweet crab meat.

The step that matters

Boil crabs in salted water for about 15 minutes. Overcooking toughens crab meat and makes it dry and stringy, while undercooking leaves it unsafe and hard to pick. Timing the boil by crab size keeps the meat tender and easy to remove from the shell.

“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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesCrab SoupCrab Soup39 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes