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Fricassee of Crabs

A creamy crab dish with egg yolks, butter, milk, and sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Fricassee of Crabs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Pound the egg yolks to a powder and mix with the butter, flour, mustard, salt, cayenne, and mace.

  2. Heat the milk to a boil, then remove from heat and gradually stir it into the mixture.

Cook and serve

  1. Stir in the crab meat and cover the mixture.

  2. Place the covered dish in boiling water for 5 minutes, stirring often.

  3. Add the sherry and serve over thin slices of peeled lemon in a deep dish.

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Lemon + mustardtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,816 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce and give it a rich, smooth body as they set gently with the milk.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and carries flavor through the sauce.
Flour
Helps thicken the milk-based sauce so it clings to the crab meat.
Milk
Forms the base of the sauce, giving it creaminess and a mild sweetness.
Crab meat
Provides the main flavor and tender, delicate texture of the dish.
Sherry
Adds aromatic acidity and depth at the end, brightening the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Gradually stirring the hot milk into the yolk mixture. Adding hot milk too quickly can scramble the egg yolks before the sauce thickens. Adding it slowly while stirring tempers the yolks so the sauce becomes smooth and creamy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (crab, meat, egg, butter, flour, milk, mustard):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Avocadofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, meat, egg, butter, flour, milk, mustard. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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