Skip to main content
Main

Minced Crab

A creamy crab mixture with egg, butter, cream, and sherry, served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Crab and meat work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 448 recipes. Both carry 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine, which smells cocoa, roasted. The science ↓

Minced Crab

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the crab meat and hard-boiled egg very fine.

Make the filling

  1. In a pan, combine the crab meat, egg, butter, and cream.

  2. Season thoroughly and cook for 8 to 9 minutes.

  3. Thicken with a cream sauce.

Finish and serve

  1. Once cooked, add the sherry and serve in a chafing dish.

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: acetoin (butter, cream).

  4. Crab + buttertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together812 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Crab + sherrytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together67 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Crab meat
Forms the main body and savoury flavour of the dish.
Hard-boiled egg
Adds body and richness to the finely chopped mixture.
Butter
Adds fat for a smooth, rich mouthfeel.
Pure cream
Adds moisture and richness, and helps thicken the mixture into a sauce.
Sherry
Adds aroma and a mellow, slightly sweet flavour when stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Cook the cream mixture gently. Cream-based mixtures can curdle or separate when overheated or boiled hard. Keeping the heat moderate over the 8 to 9 minutes helps the sauce stay smooth and thicken evenly.

“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.

You might also like

Meat CroquettesMeat Croquettes52 recipesCrab SoupCrab Soup39 recipesMeatballsMeatballs37 recipesMince MeatMince Meat37 recipes