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Crab Soup, or Potage Bisque

A creamy crab soup made with crab meat, rice, veal stock, and thickened cream.

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 Soup, or Potage Bisque

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crab

  1. Pick the meat from the claws into shreds.

  2. Pound the soft meat from the body with the boiled rice in a mortar.

  3. Thin the mixture with some clear stock and pass it through a colander.

Finish the bisque

  1. Put the mixture into a stewpan with enough veal stock to reach the desired quantity.

  2. Add the thickened cream, salt, and cayenne pepper, and bring to a boil.

  3. Remove from heat and stir in the shredded claw meat.

  4. For a richer color, add a little lobster butter.

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: acetoin (butter, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Crab
Provides the main flavor and the shredded meat texture of the bisque.
Boiled rice
Its starch thickens the pounded mixture, giving the soup body.
Veal stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavor and sets the soup's volume.
Thickened cream
Adds fat for a rich, smooth mouthfeel and softens the seasoning.

The step that matters

Stir in the claw meat off the heat. Shredded crab meat is delicate. Adding it after removing the pot from the heat keeps it tender and moist, whereas prolonged boiling toughens the protein and dulls its flavor.

“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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