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Soup

Cray Fish Soup

A soup made with veal broth, crumbled French rolls, lobster meat, crayfish tails, and seasoned with cayenne pepper and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lobster and crayfish work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 100 recipes. Both carry octanal, which smells fat, soap. The science ↓

Cray Fish Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. In a large pot, combine veal broth, crumbled French rolls, lobster meat, and pounded crayfish tails.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. Strain the soup through a tamis cloth.

  4. Season with Cayenne pepper and coarse sea salt.

  5. Bring the soup to a boil again.

Thicken and finish

  1. Mix pounded lobster spawn with a little flour and water, then strain it into the soup.

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. Lobster + crayfishtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together100 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  2. Meat + crayfishtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81 recipes

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

  3. Meat + lobstertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together909 recipes

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

  4. Veal + meattop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,890 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Lobster spawn
Its fats and proteins enrich the soup and give it a rich colour and body when stirred in.
Flour
Starch thickens the soup slightly so it has more body.
French rolls
Soaked bread adds body and helps bind the crumbled soup base.
Crayfish tails
Pounded shellfish meat adds deep seafood flavour and body to the broth.

The step that matters

Thickening with lobster spawn. Adding the spawn mixture to boiling soup can curdle or cook it grainy. Keep the soup hot but not at a hard boil, and strain the mixture in gradually so it thickens smoothly.

“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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