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Buttered Crab

A crab dish where the meat is mixed with breadcrumbs, parsley, and butter, then baked and served with lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Buttered Crab

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Pick the meat out of the crab and cut it into small pieces.

  2. Mix the crab meat with bread crumbs and parsley, and season with salt.

Fill and bake

  1. Return the mixture to the crab shell, adding small bits of butter to keep it moist.

  2. Squeeze lemon juice over the mixture or add lemon pickle or acid sauce.

  3. Top with a thick layer of bread crumbs and dot with butter.

  4. Bake in the oven at 350°F (175°C) until warmed through.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Bread + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,588 recipes

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

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 the dish's flavour.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and add body, giving the filling a soft, binding texture.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and browns the crumb topping in the oven.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich crab and balances the butter.

The step that matters

Return the mixture to the crab shell with butter. Crab meat dries out quickly when heated. Small pieces of butter mixed in add fat and moisture, keeping the filling tender rather than dry and crumbly after baking.

“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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