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Craw-Fish Soup

A broth made by boiling water, onions, carrots, parsley, peppercorns, and crawfish, thickened with bread crusts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Craw-Fish Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Boil the cold water in a pot.

  2. Skim the water when it is nearly boiling.

  3. Add onions, carrots, parsley, black and Jamaica peppercorns, and crawfish to the pot.

  4. Pound the crawfish shells and small claws, then boil them with the broth for 1 hour.

  5. Strain the broth and add bread crusts to thicken it.

Finish and serve

  1. If available, pound the lobster spawn and add it to the soup.

  2. Let the soup simmer gently for 2 minutes.

  3. Add the crawfish to heat through, 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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,588 recipes

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

  5. Onion + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,676 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Crawfish
Provides the main shellfish flavour and tender meat in the finished soup.
Bread crusts
Starch from the crusts thickens the broth as it is added.
Onions
Sweetness and savoury aroma build the base flavour of the broth.
Carrots
Add gentle sweetness and body to the broth as they cook.

The step that matters

Pound the crawfish shells and small claws, then boil them with the broth for 1 hour. Shells and claws release flavour and colour into the broth only when crushed and simmered long enough. Pounding exposes more surface, and the hour of gentle boiling extracts that flavour without breaking the stock down.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, parsley, bread, lobster):

  1. Turnipfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, parsley, bread, lobster. 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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