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Craw-fish Soup

A soup made with crawfish, onions, carrots, parsley, peppercorns, and bread crusts, simmered in a broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Craw-fish Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Boil the cold water in a large pot.

  2. Skim the surface when it reaches a near boil.

  3. Add the chopped onions, carrots, parsley, black peppercorns, Jamaica peppercorns, and crawfish.

  4. Pound the crawfish shells and small claws, then boil them with the broth for 1 hour.

  5. Strain the broth and add crusts of bread to thicken.

Finish the soup

  1. If available, pound the lobster spawn and add it to the soup.

  2. Let the soup simmer gently for a couple of minutes.

  3. Add the crawfish to heat through, and the soup is ready to serve.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  3. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Fish + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Parsley + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,588 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

Crawfish (in the method)
Provides the main seafood flavour and the tender meat added at the end.
Crawfish shells and small claws
Boiled in the broth to release flavour and body into the soup.
Bread crusts
Absorb liquid and thicken the strained broth.
Onions
Add aromatic sweetness and depth as they cook into the broth.
Carrots
Add gentle sweetness and body to the broth.

The step that matters

Adding the crawfish at the end. Crawfish meat is delicate and toughens and dries out if overcooked, so it should only be added to heat through shortly before serving.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, parsley, fish, bread, lobster):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, parsley, fish, bread, 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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