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Crab Soup

A soup made from crab meat, rice, stock, cream, and optional lobster butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Crab Soup

Why it works: Crab and lobster work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 196 recipes. Both carry octanal, which smells fat, soap. The science ↓

Crab Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Remove all the meat from the crab.

  2. Mix the crab meat with the cooked rice.

  3. Pound the mixture and add stock or boiling water until it reaches a thick cream consistency.

  4. Pass the mixture through a fine sieve.

Finish the soup

  1. Heat the soup without boiling it.

  2. Boil the cream and stir it into the soup.

  3. Add lobster butter for color 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + lobstertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together196 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  2. Cream + lobstertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,050 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Crab + creamtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together317 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetoin (butter, cream).

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

What each ingredient does

Crab meat
Provides the main flavor and the body of the soup.
Cooked rice
Thickens the mixture and gives it a smooth, creamy texture when pounded and sieved.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the finished soup.
Lobster butter
Adds fat and a deeper color to the soup.

The step that matters

Heat the soup without boiling it. Boiling can cause dairy-based cream to separate and curdle, and it can make a thickened soup grainy or break its smooth texture.

“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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