Name: Hot Crabs
Ingredients: cooked crab meat; nutmeg to taste; coarse sea salt to taste; cayenne pepper to taste; butter; grated bread crumbs; vinegar; dry toast slices

Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Hot Crabs

Ingredients

Directions

Extract all the meat from the cooked crab shells and chop it finely.
Season the crab meat with nutmeg, coarse sea salt, and cayenne pepper.
Add a bit of butter, some grated bread crumbs, and enough vinegar to moisten the mixture.
Fill the crab shells with the mixture.
Brown the filled shells by holding a red-hot shovel or salamander above them.
Cover a large dish with small slices of dry toast, crusts removed.
Place a filled crab shell on each slice of 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.

Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together13,015 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Crab + meattop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together448 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).
Crab + buttertop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together812 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Nutmeg + breadtop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,997 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (crab, meat, pepper, butter, bread, vinegar):

Parsleyfits better
Garlicfits better
Tarragonfits better
Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, meat, pepper, butter, bread, vinegar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.