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Hot Crab

Hot Crab is a crab dish cooked with butter, breadcrumbs, vinegar, veal gravy, spices, and served in the shell.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Hot Crab

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

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

  2. In a bowl, combine the crab meat, nutmeg, salt, pepper, butter, bread crumbs, vinegar, veal gravy, and cayenne.

Cook and fill

  1. Simmer the mixture for five minutes.

  2. Return the mixture to the cleaned crab shell.

  3. Sprinkle bread crumbs on top and brown it under a broiler or with a salamander.

Serve

  1. Serve on a folded napkin and garnish with parsley.

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

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

  2. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Nutmeg + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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 of the filling and provides the seafood flavor.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavor and keeping the filling moist.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid to thicken the filling and form a crust that browns on top.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens and brightens the rich crab and butter flavors.
Veal gravy
Adds savory depth and body to the filling.

The step that matters

Browning the bread crumb topping. Bread crumbs brown quickly under a broiler through Maillard browning, so they can scorch before the filling is heated through. Watch closely and stop once golden.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Garlicfits about as well
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, meat, pepper, butter, bread, vinegar, veal. 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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