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To Make a Crab Pie

A baked crab pie made with boiled crab meat, bread crumbs, butter, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

To Make a Crab Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the crab

  1. Boil the crabs in water with salt for 20 minutes.

  2. Once cooled, pick the meat from the claws and body.

Make the filling and bake

  1. Chop the crab meat and mix it with bread crumbs, pepper, salt, and butter.

  2. Fill the crab shell with the mixture.

  3. Bake in a hot oven at 400°F (200°C) until browned.

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

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

  2. Crab + buttertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together812 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Crab + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together922 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Crab + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together387 recipes

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

  5. Bread + peppertop 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

Crab meat
Forms the main body of the filling and provides the dish's core flavor.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and help bind the filling so it holds together in the shell.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and helps the top brown during baking.

The step that matters

Bake until browned. The filling is already cooked, so the bake mainly sets the crumbs and browns the surface. Too little heat leaves it pale and loose, while overbaking can dry the crab meat.

“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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