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Crab, Potted

Potted crab is crab meat seasoned and baked in small pots with clarified butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Crab and butter work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 812 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Crab, Potted

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderately hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderately hot oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the crab

  1. Remove the meat from the crab shells.

  2. Pound the meat in a mortar with salt, cayenne, and mace.

  3. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve.

Pot and bake

  1. Press the mixture into small pots and cover with melted clarified butter.

  2. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) for 1 hour.

Finish

  1. When cold, cover each pot with additional clarified 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 + buttertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together812 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Mace + buttertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,405 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  3. Crab + macetop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78 recipes

Mace and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,405 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 potted mixture, giving it its flavor and soft, spreadable texture.
Clarified butter
Seals the surface of each pot and adds richness, helping preserve the crab beneath.

The step that matters

Rubbing the mixture through a fine sieve. Pushing the pounded crab through a fine sieve breaks up fibers and removes shell fragments, producing a smooth, even texture rather than a stringy or gritty one.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (crab, butter):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, butter. 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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