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Stewed Hard Shell Crabs

A stew of hard shell crabs cooked with tomatoes, onions, garlic, butter, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Stewed Hard Shell Crabs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crabs

  1. Scald and clean the crabs by removing the top shell and claws.

  2. Pick the meat from the claws.

Cook

  1. Fry the meat with the bodies of the crabs in butter, along with the onion and garlic.

  2. Add the browned flour, coloring pepper, water, bay leaves, parsley, and tomatoes.

  3. Let the mixture simmer for about 1½ hours.

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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Tomato + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  4. Garlic + parsleytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Hard shell crabs
Provide the main meat and body flavor of the stew.
Butter
Fat that carries the frying of the crab meat and aromatics, adding richness.
Browned flour
Thickens the stew and adds a toasted, nutty flavor.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and liquid that build the body of the stew.

The step that matters

Frying the crab meat in butter. Frying in butter with the onion and garlic browns the surfaces and builds flavor compounds before liquid is added. Cooking too briefly or too hot can leave the aromatics raw or scorched, so the base tastes flat or bitter.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (crab, pepper, onion, garlic, butter, flour, parsley):

  1. Okrafits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, pepper, onion, garlic, butter, flour, parsley. 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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