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Crab

Crab meat mixed with breadcrumbs, oil, vinegar, cayenne, and salt, stuffed into the shell and garnished.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crab

  1. Break off the claws, crack them, and pick out the meat using a skewer for the smaller ones.

  2. Carefully remove the flesh from the inside, avoiding the poisonous parts.

  3. Flake the crab meat very small and mix it with the bread crumbs, oil, vinegar, cayenne, and salt.

Fill and decorate

  1. Clean and dry the shell, then fill it with the crab mixture.

  2. Arrange the small claws around the shell and decorate with lobster coral or colored egg white and 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.

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

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  2. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Crab + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together922 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Crab + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together387 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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 provides the dish's flavour.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the oil and vinegar and bind the flaked crab into a spreadable filling.
Oil
Adds richness and moisture so the filling stays soft rather than dry.
Vinegar
Adds a sharp acidity that brightens the rich crab flavour.

The step that matters

Removing the flesh from the inside. The record warns to avoid the poisonous parts of the crab, such as the stomach sac and gills, which are not safe to eat. Cooks should pick only the clean white meat so the filling is both safe and tastes fresh.

“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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