Name: Crab, Dressed
Ingredients: 1 cooked crab; 2 tablespoons oil; 1 tablespoon vinegar; ¼ teaspoon pepper; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt; a pinch of cayenne; butter for polishing; parsley for decoration; 1 hard-boiled egg (whites and yolk separated)

Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Crab, Dressed

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crab

Remove all the meat from the crab and break the claws to extract the flesh.
Shred the white flesh with a fork.
Wash the empty shell with hot water and polish it with a little butter.

Make and fill

Mix the soft dark flesh with oil, vinegar, pepper, salt, and cayenne.
Fill the shell alternately with the white and dark mixtures.

Decorate

Decorate with parsley, chopped egg white, and powdered yolk.

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.

Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Crab + buttertop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together812 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,814 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together28,563 recipes

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

Crab: Provides the main meat, with white and dark flesh giving contrasting texture and flavour.
Oil: Carries fat-soluble flavour and keeps the dark crab flesh moist and rich.
Vinegar: Adds acidity that brightens the sweet flavour of the crab meat.
Hard-boiled egg: Adds richness and a soft, crumbly texture to the garnish.

Swap the parsley

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

Tarragonfits about as well
Parsleythe original
Nutmegfits less well
Capersfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, vinegar, pepper, butter, egg. 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.