Name: Crayfish in Aspic
Ingredients: aspic; crayfish with shells; sliced lemon

Why it works: Crayfish and lemon work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 162 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Crayfish in Aspic

Ingredients

aspic
crayfish with shells
sliced lemon

Directions

Set the base layer

Pour aspic into a mold to a thickness of ¼ inch.
Let the aspic cool completely.
Decorate the aspic as you would for jelly marble.

Add the crayfish

Add a little more aspic.
Let the added aspic cool.
Place the crayfish with the reddest shells into the mold.
Fill the mold completely.
Refrigerate until set.

Unmold and serve

Turn out the aspic.
Garnish 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.

Crayfish + lemontop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together162 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Aspic: Sets into a clear jelly that holds the crayfish in place and gives the dish its body.
Crayfish with shells: Provides the main flavor and the red color that shows through the clear aspic.

“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.