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Craw-fish Soup

A broth made with crawfish shells, vegetables, spices, and bread crusts, simmered and served with crawfish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Craw-fish Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. In a large pot, bring the cold water to a boil.

  2. Skim off any foam that forms on the surface.

  3. Add the onions, carrots, parsley, black peppercorns, and allspice berries.

  4. Pound the crawfish shells and small claws, then add them to the broth.

  5. Boil the mixture for about 1 hour.

  6. Strain the broth and return it to the pot.

Finish the soup

  1. Add crusts of bread to thicken the soup.

  2. If available, pound the lobster spawn and add it to the soup.

  3. Let the soup simmer gently for a couple of minutes.

  4. Add the crawfish to heat through, and the soup is ready to serve.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + allspicetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,289 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Carrot + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,021 recipes

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

  4. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 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

Crawfish
Provides the main meaty flavor and body of the soup.
Crawfish shells and small claws
Release savory shellfish flavor into the broth as they boil.
Bread crusts
Starch from the bread thickens the broth slightly.
Onions
Add sweetness and savory depth as they cook into the broth.
Carrots
Add gentle sweetness and body to the broth.

The step that matters

Boiling the broth for about 1 hour. A long, steady boil extracts flavor from the shells and vegetables. Boiling too hard can cloud the broth and reduce it too quickly, so keep it at a steady simmer-like boil while the flavors develop.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, parsley, allspice, bread, lobster):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, parsley, allspice, bread, lobster. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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