Skip to main content
Main

Boiled Crabs

A simple boiled crab dish seasoned with bay leaves, sea salt, lemon, and red pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Boiled Crabs

Ingredients

Directions

Boil the crabs

  1. Boil water with bay leaves, coarse sea salt, red pepper, and sliced lemons.

  2. Once boiling, add the crabs.

  3. Drain the water from the crabs as soon as they are cooked.

Cool and serve

  1. Set aside to cool and serve on a platter covered with cracked ice.

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Crab + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together387 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Crabs
Provide the main protein, which firms and turns opaque as it cooks in the boiling water.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the cooking water so the crab meat is flavoured as it cooks.
Lemons
Add acidity and aroma to the cooking water, brightening the flavour of the crab.
Red pepper
Adds heat and spice to the cooking water, flavouring the crab.

The step that matters

Drain the crabs as soon as they are cooked. Crab overcooks quickly in boiling water, becoming tough and rubbery. Removing it promptly keeps the meat tender and moist.

“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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesCrab SoupCrab Soup39 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes