Name: To Dress Boiled Crabs with Two Eggs
Ingredients: 1 cup crab meat, chopped; 1 cup bread crumbs; 2 hard-boiled eggs, chopped; 1 teaspoon chopped parsley; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt; ¼ teaspoon black pepper; additional bread crumbs for topping; sliced lemon for serving

Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Dress Boiled Crabs with Two Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

Remove the meat from the crabs and chop it into small dice.
Mix the crab meat with bread crumbs, hard-boiled eggs, parsley, salt, and pepper.

Fill and bake

Clean the crab shells and fill them with the mixture.
Sprinkle additional bread crumbs on top.
Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven until golden brown.

Serve

Serve with sliced lemon.

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.

Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,037 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Crab + meattop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together448 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).
Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together22,662 recipes

Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Crab meat: Provides the main flavor and the bulk of the cakes.
Bread crumbs: Absorb moisture and give the mixture body so it holds together.
Hard-boiled eggs: Bind the mixture and add richness and structure.

“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.