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Crab in White Sauce

Crab in white sauce is a dish of crab flesh mixed with white sauce, shallot, lemon juice, and breadcrumbs, baked in the shell.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Crab in White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix the crab flesh with the White Sauce, shallot, salt, pepper, and lemon juice in a bowl.

  2. Wipe out the crab shell and rub it with oil.

Assemble and bake

  1. Fill the shell with the crab mixture and level the top.

  2. Dredge the top with breadcrumbs and brown slightly in the oven.

  3. Heat through and serve, optionally sprinkling with lobster coral and adding croutons on top.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Crab + lobstertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together196 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  4. Sauce + lobstertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,095 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Shallot + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,898 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 flesh
Forms the main body of the dish and provides its sweet, delicate flavor.
White sauce
Binds the crab and adds moisture and creaminess to the filling.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce and sweet crab.
Breadcrumbs
Form a crisp, golden browned topping when baked.

The step that matters

Brown the breadcrumb topping slightly in the oven. Breadcrumbs brown quickly through Maillard reactions at high heat, so over-baking can scorch the topping while the filling stays cold. Watch the color and heat only until golden.

Swap the shallot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (crab, sauce, pepper, lemon, lobster):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Horseradishfits better
  4. Shallotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, sauce, pepper, lemon, lobster. 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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