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Crab Flakes

A creamy crab sauce served on buttered toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 Flakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a chafing dish.

  2. Mix in the flour, then add the cream and milk, stirring until smooth and creamy.

  3. Hard boil the eggs, then rub the yolks to a paste.

  4. Add 1 tablespoon of the sauce to the yolks, then mix this back into the rest of the sauce.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the crab flakes and seasoning, stirring until very hot.

  2. Serve on buttered toast.

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

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

  2. Crab + meattop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together448 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: acetoin (butter, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Crab meat
Forms the main body of the dish and provides its delicate flaky texture.
Flour
Thickens the butter and dairy into a smooth, creamy sauce.
Egg yolks
Enrich the sauce, adding richness and body as they blend in.
Butter
Adds fat and rich flavour to the sauce base.
Cream
Adds richness and a silkier texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Rubbing the yolks to a paste and mixing them into the sauce. Lumps of yolk stay visible if the yolks are not smoothed well, and adding them to hot sauce without first thinning with some sauce can cause them to curdle. Blending a spoonful of sauce into the yolks first tempers them so the sauce stays smooth.

“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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