Name: Deviled Crabs
Ingredients: 6 crabs; 4 boiled eggs; ¼ cup butter; ½ lemon; coarse sea salt to taste; cayenne pepper to taste; Lea & Perrin's sauce to taste; 6 crushed crackers

Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Deviled Crabs

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

Boil the crabs and remove the meat.
In a bowl, combine crab meat, chopped boiled eggs, butter, lemon juice, salt, cayenne pepper, Lea & Perrin's sauce, and crushed crackers.

Bake and serve

Spoon the mixture back into the crab shells.
Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until heated through.

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.

Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Crab + buttertop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together812 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Crab + saucetop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together238 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together15,338 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Crab + peppertop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together922 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

Crabs: Provide the main meat that forms the body of the filling.
Boiled eggs: Add richness and a soft, creamy texture to the filling.
Butter: Adds fat and richness, keeping the filling moist during baking.
Crushed crackers: Absorb moisture and bind the filling so it holds its shape.

“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.