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To Dress Crab Cold

A chilled crab salad made with crab meat, breadcrumbs, anchovy essence, vinegar, oil, and spices, garnished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

To Dress Crab Cold

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crab

  1. Pick out all the soft meat from the crab body and claws, placing them on separate plates.

  2. Clean the crab body shell.

Make the filling

  1. In a bowl, combine the soft meat from the body with bread crumbs, salt, cayenne, essence of anchovy, salad oil, vinegar, and elder vinegar.

  2. Pound the crab spawn with a small amount of butter in a mortar, then mix the pounded crab spawn with the other ingredients.

Assemble and serve

  1. Fill the shell with the mixture.

  2. Arrange the claw meat around it.

  3. Garnish with parsley before serving.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

  3. Crab + anchovytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together79 recipes

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

  4. Meat + crabtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together448 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Soft meat from crab body
Forms the main body of the salad, providing its flavor and texture.
Bread crumbs
Absorbs liquids and gives the filling body so it holds together.
Salad oil
Adds richness and moisture, softening the filling.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the crab.
Essence of anchovy
Adds a savory, salty depth that enhances the crab flavor.
Soft meat from crab claws
Supplies extra delicate crab meat for arranging around the filling.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, crab, bread, pepper, anchovy, vinegar, butter):

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Garlicfits about as well
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Thymefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, crab, bread, pepper, anchovy, vinegar, butter. 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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