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Deviled Crabs

A dish of crab meat mixed with eggs, butter, lemon, spices, and flour, baked in shells.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Deviled Crabs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Combine crab meat, eggs, and coral with butter in a saucepan and warm well.

  2. Add lemon juice, red pepper, salt, mustard, and flour; stir well.

  3. Just before removing from heat, add the yolks of the eggs and mix thoroughly.

Fill and brown

  1. Fill the crab shells with the mixture, sprinkle with cracker meal and melted butter, and brown in the oven.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Meat + crabtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together448 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Lemon + mustardtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,816 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Crab meat
Forms the main body of the filling and carries most of the flavor.
Eggs
Bind the filling and help it set as it heats.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the filling and helps it warm evenly.
Flour
Thickens the mixture so it holds its shape in the shells.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich crab and butter.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks. Yolks thicken as they heat, so they should go in just before removing the pan from the heat and be mixed in thoroughly. Adding them too early can scramble them and leave lumps.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, egg, crab, butter, pepper, mustard, flour):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Avocadofits about as well
  3. Raisinfits less well
  4. Limefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, egg, crab, butter, pepper, mustard, 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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