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Crab Meat

A tomato-based crab sauce with mushrooms and onions, served hot over toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,719 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Crab Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a pan and fry the minced onion until it turns yellow, not brown.

  2. Add the tomato soup to the pan.

  3. Break up the crab meat with a fork and add it to the pan.

  4. Drain the mushrooms and add them to the mixture.

  5. If the mixture is too thin, mix the flour and water to create a thickening agent and add it to the pan.

Serve

  1. Serve hot over toast.

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. Tomato + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,719 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  2. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Crab + meattop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together448 recipes

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

  4. Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

  5. Mushroom + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the sauce when mixed with water and stirred in.
Butter
Fat that cooks the onion and carries flavor into the sauce.
Button mushrooms
Add savory body and a soft, meaty texture to the sauce.
Crab meat
Main protein, giving the sauce its seafood flavor and flaky texture.

The step that matters

Cook the onion gently until yellow, not brown. Browning the onion in butter adds bitter, scorched notes that clash with the delicate crab and tomato. Gentle cooking softens the onion and builds a sweeter base.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (crab, meat, mushroom, onion, butter, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, meat, mushroom, onion, butter, flour. 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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