Name: Buttered Crab
Ingredients: 1 large crab; ¼ cup bread crumbs; 1 tablespoon finely chopped parsley; Coarse sea salt to taste; Butter; Juice of 1 lemon or 1 tablespoon lemon pickle or acid sauce

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

Pick the meat out of the crab and cut it into small pieces.
Mix the crab meat with bread crumbs, parsley, and salt.

Fill and bake

Return the mixture to the crab shell, adding small bits of butter.
Squeeze lemon juice over the mixture.
Top with a thick layer of bread crumbs and more butter.
Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven 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.

Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,037 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Crab + buttertop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together812 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together28,563 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
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 meat: Forms the main body of the filling and gives the dish its flavor.
Bread crumbs: Absorb moisture and form a crisp, golden topping when baked.
Butter: Adds fat and richness, and browns the topping as it melts.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the rich crab and butter.

“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.