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Crayfish Soup

A soup made with crayfish, butter, French rolls, stock, salt, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Crayfish and butter work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 343 recipes. Both carry anethole, which smells sweet, anise. The science ↓

Crayfish Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crayfish

  1. Remove the gut from the crayfish to avoid bitterness.

  2. Boil the crayfish in salted water until they turn red.

  3. Pick the meat from the tails.

Make the soup

  1. Pound the bodies with the butter in a stewpan.

  2. Add the French rolls and stock, and simmer for 1 hour without boiling.

  3. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve.

  4. Add the crayfish tails and 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. Crayfish + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together343 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  2. Butter + fishtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

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

  3. Crayfish + fishtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together90 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

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

What each ingredient does

Crayfish
Provides the main flavour and, through the pounded bodies, the body of the soup.
Butter
Adds richness and carries the flavour of the pounded crayfish bodies.
French rolls
Soak up liquid and help thicken the soup as they break down during simmering.
Fish or meat stock
Forms the liquid base that the other ingredients simmer in.

The step that matters

Simmer for 1 hour without boiling. A gentle simmer lets the flavours develop and the rolls break down while keeping the soup smooth and clear. A rolling boil can make it cloudy and cause it to reduce unevenly.

“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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