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Dressed Crab

A crab dish where cooked crab meat is mixed with seasonings and mayonnaise, then stuffed back into the shell.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Dressed Crab

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crab

  1. Remove the claws from the crab and break them to extract the white meat.

  2. Take out the meat from the shell and remove the bag near the head.

  3. Chop the creamy meat from the inside and mix it with the claw meat.

Make the filling

  1. Season the mixture with salt, cayenne, and lemon juice, then mix with mayonnaise or cream to a soft consistency.

Dress and serve

  1. Wash and dry the shell, then rub it with a little salad oil.

  2. Fill the shell with the crab mixture.

  3. Sprinkle lightly with brown bread crumbs, decorate with lobster or green butter, and garnish with the claws.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: acetoin (butter, cream).

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

Cooked crab
Provides the main body of white and creamy meat for the dish.
Mayonnaise or cream
Adds moisture and richness, giving the crab mixture a soft, spreadable texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the richness of the crab.
Brown bread crumbs
Sprinkled on top, they add a light crumb texture to the surface.

The step that matters

Mixing to a soft consistency. Mayonnaise or cream must be blended in gently until the mixture is soft but still holds its shape. Overmixing or adding too much liquid makes the filling loose and watery, so it will not sit neatly in the shell.

“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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