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Soup

Cray Fish Soup

A soup of veal stock, lobster meat, pounded crayfish, and French bread crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lobster and crayfish work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 100 recipes. Both carry octanal, which smells fat, soap. The science ↓

Cray Fish Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Boil veal stock until moderately thick.

  2. Add the crumb of French rolls, lobster meat, and pounded crayfish.

  3. Skim the surface and rub the mixture through a tamis cloth.

  4. Season with salt and Cayenne pepper.

Serve

  1. Serve with small round pieces of French bread crust.

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. Lobster + crayfishtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together100 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  2. Meat + crayfishtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).

  3. Meat + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,924 recipes

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

  4. Meat + lobstertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together909 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal stock
Forms the liquid base of the soup, carrying the flavour of the other ingredients.
French rolls crumb
Thickens the soup and gives it body as it cooks and is rubbed through the cloth.
Crayfish
Provides the main shellfish flavour and colour when pounded into the soup.
Lobster meat
Adds rich shellfish flavour and body to the soup.

The step that matters

Rubbing the mixture through a tamis cloth. Pressing the cooked mixture through a fine cloth removes fibrous solids and skins, giving the soup a smooth, even texture. Skimming first removes impurities that would otherwise cloud the finished soup.

“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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