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Crab Soup

A soup made with crab meat, rice, milk, and fish stock, seasoned with cayenne pepper and anchovy essence.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Crab Soup

Why it works: Rice and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,137 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Crab Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Wash the rice carefully and soak it in 1 pint of fish stock for a few hours.

  2. Boil a small piece of stick cinnamon with the rice.

Make the soup

  1. In a pot, combine the soaked rice, milk, and a pinch of salt and cayenne pepper.

  2. Add the butter and bring to a boil until the rice is perfectly soft.

  3. Mix in the yellow meat from the crab and the fish stock.

  4. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve.

  5. Return the mixture to the pot.

  6. Add the essence of anchovies or shrimps.

  7. Season to taste.

  8. Tear the flesh from the crab claws.

  9. Add the crab flesh to the soup and heat through without boiling.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Rice + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Crab + shrimptop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together123 recipes

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

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  4. Milk + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Pepper + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,890 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Thickens the soup as it cooks soft and breaks down into a creamy body.
Milk
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy texture to the soup.
Crab
Provides the main sweet, delicate seafood flavour and the soup's character.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a rounded, silky mouthfeel.
Fish stock
Supplies the savoury seafood base that carries the other flavours.

The step that matters

Heat the crab flesh through without boiling. Crab meat is delicate and turns tough and rubbery when it boils, so it should be added last and only heated gently until warm.

Swap the cinnamon

The recipe marks cinnamon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (crab, milk, fish, rice, butter, pepper, shrimp):

  1. Parsleyfits about as well
  2. Celeryfits about as well
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Cinnamonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, milk, fish, rice, butter, pepper, shrimp. 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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