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Crab Savoury

A crab mixture with bread crumbs, butter, mustard, and spices served with toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Crab Savoury

Ingredients

Directions

Make the crab mixture

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the bread crumbs, cream, and mustard.

  3. Stir until the mixture boils.

  4. Add the crab meat, minced pimentos, beaten egg yolks, salt, and cayenne pepper.

Serve

  1. Serve with hot buttered toast.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Crab + meattop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together448 recipes

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

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  4. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Crab + creamtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together317 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetoin (butter, cream).

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

What each ingredient does

Crab meat
Provides the main flavor and the body of the filling.
Bread crumbs
Thicken the cream mixture into a spreadable base that holds the filling together.
Eggs
Add richness and help set the mixture as it is combined.
Cream or milk
Adds moisture and softness, loosening the crumbs into a smooth mixture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the saucepan base.

The step that matters

Add the egg yolks to the hot mixture. Eggs can scramble if they meet very hot liquid directly. Beaten eggs should be stirred in gradually, with the pan off or low heat, so the mixture thickens smoothly rather than curdling.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, meat, butter, bread, egg, cream, pepper. 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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