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Buttered Crab

A crab dish baked with bread crumbs, parsley, butter, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Buttered Crab

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Pick the meat carefully out of the crab and cut it into small pieces.

  2. Mix the crab meat with the bread crumbs and parsley, and season with salt.

Fill and bake

  1. Return the mixture to the crab shell, adding small bits of butter throughout.

  2. Squeeze lemon juice over the mixture or add lemon pickle or acid sauce.

  3. Top with a thick layer of bread crumbs and dot with butter.

  4. Bake in the oven at 400°F (200°C) until warmed through.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Bread + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,588 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

Crab
Provides the main body and delicate sweet flavour of the dish.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and form a light structure, then brown to a crisp topping.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and helps the top brown as it bakes.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich crab and balances the butter.

The step that matters

Returning the mixture to the shell with butter. Butter spread through the filling melts during baking, keeping the crab moist and rich. Too little butter can leave the meat dry, while the top layer of crumbs needs enough butter to brown evenly.

“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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