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Broiled Soft-shell Crabs

Soft-shell crabs coated in butter, lemon, cayenne, salted flour, then broiled and served with tartare sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Broiled Soft-shell Crabs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the butter

  1. Melt the butter in a deep platter.

  2. Mix in the lemon juice and cayenne pepper.

Coat the crabs

  1. Sprinkle salt on the cleaned crabs.

  2. Roll the crabs in the butter mixture, then drain briefly.

  3. Dredge the crabs well in salted flour.

Broil and serve

  1. Cook in an oyster broiler over clear coals.

  2. Serve with sauce tartare.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Carries flavor and moisture, and helps the crab brown as it cooks.
Salted flour
Forms a light coating that helps the crab hold its moisture and brown in the broiler.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter.

The step that matters

Dredge the crabs well in salted flour. A thin, even flour coating helps the crab brown and seals in moisture during broiling. Patchy or thick coating can burn in some spots or leave others pale and dry.

“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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