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Hot Crab

A spicy crab meat dish seasoned with cayenne, salt, nutmeg, butter, mustard, lemon or vinegar, topped with bread crumbs and clarified butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Hot Crab

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crab

  1. Remove the meat from the boiled crab and clean the shell.

  2. Cut the crab flesh into small pieces and season with cayenne, salt, nutmeg, and butter.

Heat and finish

  1. Heat the mixture over low heat until very hot.

  2. Stir in the mustard and lemon juice or vinegar.

Bake and serve

  1. Return the crab meat to the shell and cover it thickly with bread crumbs.

  2. Drizzle with clarified butter and brown under a salamander or a hot kitchen fire-shovel.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  4. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Meat + crabtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together448 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
Provides the main flavour and the body of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the crab as it heats.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden topping when browned.
Mustard
Adds sharpness that balances the richness of the butter.
Lemon juice or vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet crab flavour.

The step that matters

Heating the mixture over low heat until very hot. Crab meat is delicate and can toughen or dry out if it is overheated, so gentle heat warms it through while keeping it tender and moist.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Avocadofits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Coconutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, crab, pepper, nutmeg, butter, mustard, bread. 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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