Name: Deviled Crabs
Ingredients: 1 crab; cayenne pepper to taste; mustard to taste; coarse sea salt to taste; table sauce of your choice; cracker crumbs; 1 tablespoon cream; butter; parsley for garnish

Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Deviled Crabs

Ingredients

Directions

Boil the crab and extract the meat.
Season the meat with cayenne pepper, mustard, coarse sea salt, and your preferred table sauce.
Place the mixture in a covered saucepan with enough hot water to prevent burning.
Add moistened cracker crumbs and butter to the mixture.
Serve in the crab shell, garnished with a sprig of parsley.

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.

Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Mustard + parsleytop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,588 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,516 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together15,430 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Sauce + creamtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,787 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (crab, pepper, sauce, cream, butter, parsley):

Capsicumfits about as well
Potatofits about as well
Spinachfits about as well
Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, pepper, sauce, cream, butter, parsley. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.