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Crayfish Soup

A soup made from crayfish, butter, French rolls, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Crayfish and butter work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 343 recipes. Both carry anethole, which smells sweet, anise. The science ↓

Crayfish Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crayfish

  1. Remove the gut from the crayfish tails to avoid bitterness.

  2. Boil the crayfish in salted water until they turn red.

  3. Pick the meat from the tails.

  4. Pound the bodies of the crayfish with the butter.

Make the soup

  1. Combine the pounded mixture with the French rolls and stock in a stewpan for 1 hour without boiling.

  2. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the crayfish tails back into the soup and serve.

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. Crayfish + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together343 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  2. Butter + fishtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Crayfish + fishtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together90 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

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

What each ingredient does

Crayfish
Provides the main shellfish flavour and the body of the soup.
Butter
Adds fat that carries flavour and gives the soup a rich mouthfeel.
French rolls
Absorb liquid and thicken the soup, giving it body.
Fish or meat stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the other ingredients.

The step that matters

Combine and simmer without boiling. Holding the mixture below a boil for a full hour lets the flavours extract gently, while a rolling boil can make the soup harsh and cloudy.

“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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