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To Dress Crab Cold

A chilled crab dish dressed with bread crumbs, cayenne, anchovy essence, vinegar, butter, and elder vinegar, garnished with spawn and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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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 ↓

To Dress Crab Cold

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crab

  1. Pick out the meat from the crab and place it in one plate, and the claws in another.

Dress and plate

  1. Add bread crumbs, cayenne, essence of anchovy, common vinegar, clarified butter, and elder vinegar to the crab meat and mix thoroughly.

  2. Clean the crab shell and place the dressed meat at one end and the claws at the other.

Garnish

  1. Pound the spawn in a mortar, rub it through a sieve, and lay it over the crab in a diamond pattern.

  2. If no spawn is available, substitute with lobster spawn and garnish with parsley.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Crab + anchovytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together79 recipes

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

  4. Crab + meattop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together448 recipes

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

  5. Crab + buttertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together812 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 meat
Forms the main body of the salad and carries the flavour of the dressing.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the dressing and give the crab meat a softer, binding texture.
Clarified butter
Adds richness and a smooth, fatty mouthfeel to the crab meat.
Common vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet flavour of the crab.
Crab spawn or lobster spawn
Provides a rich, concentrated seafood flavour and colour as the topping.

The step that matters

Mixing the dressing into the crab meat. Mixing thoroughly spreads the bread crumbs, fat and acid evenly, so every bite is seasoned and moist rather than patchy or dry.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Garlicfits about as well
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Thymefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, meat, bread, pepper, anchovy, vinegar, 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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