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Crabs, Soft-shell

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Crab and pepper work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 922 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Crabs, Soft-shell

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cook crabs as soon as possible after catching for best flavor.

  2. Select lively crabs and remove the feathery substance from under the shells.

  3. Rinse the crabs in cold water and drain them.

  4. Season the crabs with salt and pepper.

  5. Dredge the crabs in flour.

  6. Fry the crabs in hot fat until golden brown.

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. Crab + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together922 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Crab + flourtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together384 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).

  3. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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