Skip to main content
Sauce

Sauce Au Crabes Dures--hard Crab Sauce

A sauce made with crab flakes, butter, and sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Crab and butter work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 812 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Sauce Au Crabes Dures--hard Crab Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Heat butter in a pan over medium heat.

  2. Add crab flakes and sauté until heated through.

  3. Stir in a dash of sherry before serving.

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 + buttertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together812 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Crab + sherrytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together67 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).

  3. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Crab flakes
Provide the main protein and sweet, delicate flavour that forms the body of the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour while the crab warms and browns lightly in the pan.
Sherry
Adds a small amount of acidity and aroma that brightens the rich butter and crab.

The step that matters

Sautéing the crab until heated through. Crab is already cooked, so it only needs gentle warming. Overheating toughens its delicate protein and dries it out, so keep the heat moderate and stop once it is warm.

“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

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes