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Crab Soup

A creamy crab soup made with boiled crab, milk, fish stock, rice, butter, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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

Cook the rice

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

  2. Boil the soaked rice in the milk with a pinch of salt, cayenne pepper, and butter until perfectly soft.

Finish the soup

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

  2. Pass the mixture through a fine sieve and add the essence of anchovies or shrimps and more seasoning.

  3. Return to the pan, stir until it boils, then add the claw meat and heat through without boiling again.

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
Softens and releases starch, thickening the milk into a smooth, body-rich base.
Milk
Provides the creamy liquid that the rice cooks in and gives the soup its body.
Crab
Supplies the main sweet, delicate seafood flavour and tender meat.
Fish stock
Adds a savoury seafood backbone that deepens the flavour of the soup.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother, rounder mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Heating the claw meat without boiling again. Milk-based soups can scorch or curdle when boiled, and crab meat toughens and loses its delicacy when overheated. Gentle heating keeps the texture soft and the soup smooth.

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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