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To Make a Crab Pie

A baked crab pie with crab meat, bread crumbs, butter, vinegar, cayenne pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

To Make a Crab Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the crab

  1. Boil the crabs alive in a pan of boiling water with some salt for 20-25 minutes, depending on their size.

  2. Once cooled, pick the meat from the claws and body.

  3. Chop the crab meat and mix it with bread crumbs, cayenne pepper, salt, butter, and vinegar.

Fill and bake

  1. Place the mixture into the crab shell.

  2. Add a few pieces of butter on top.

  3. Brown it in the oven at 400°F (200°C) or before the fire.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Crab
Provides the main meat that forms the body of the pie.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and bind the chopped crab into a mixture that holds its shape.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and helps the top brown during baking.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the rich crab meat.

The step that matters

Browning the top in the oven. Butter and the crumbs need enough dry, direct heat to brown; too little heat leaves the top pale and the filling underdone and wet.

“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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