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Scalloped Crab

A crab dish baked in a butter and flour sauce, topped with breadcrumbs and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Scalloped Crab

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crab

  1. Pick all the meat from the crab, leaving the small claws intact.

  2. Scald the large shell, rub it with coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt') to cleanse, and then dry it.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a pan, add the flour, and gradually stir in the milk until boiling.

  2. Add the anchovy essence and seasonings, then stir in the picked crab meat and heat through.

Fill and garnish

  1. Fill the crab shell with the mixture, sprinkle breadcrumbs on top, and garnish with the small claws standing upright.

  2. Rub the hard-boiled egg through a sieve over the dish and finish with a few sprigs of parsley.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Butter + crabtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together812 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + anchovytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,330 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries flavour while helping the flour form a smooth roux.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth white sauce that holds the crab meat together.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which thickens as it comes to the boil.
Crab
Provides the main meat and sweet, delicate flavour of the dish.
Hard-boiled egg
Adds richness and a fine sieved garnish that contrasts with the sauce.

The step that matters

Bringing the sauce to the boil. Flour must be cooked while the milk thickens, otherwise the sauce stays pasty and tastes raw. Stir constantly so lumps do not form and the sauce turns smooth and glossy.

“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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