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Crayfish Soup

A soup made with veal stock, lobster meat, pounded crayfish, and French roll crumbs, served hot with trench bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lobster and crayfish work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 100 recipes. Both carry octanal, which smells fat, soap. The science ↓

Crayfish Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Combine veal stock, French roll crumbs, lobster meat, pounded crayfish, and lobster spawn in a pot.

  2. Bring to a boil, then skim off any impurities.

  3. Strain the mixture through a fine cloth to achieve a smooth consistency.

  4. Adjust thickness as needed.

  5. Season with salt and cayenne pepper.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with small round pieces of trench bread.

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. Lobster + crayfishtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together100 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  2. Meat + crayfishtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81 recipes

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

  3. Meat + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,924 recipes

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

  4. Meat + lobstertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together909 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavour of the soup.
French rolls
Their crumb thickens the soup and gives it body.
Lobster meat
Adds the main seafood flavour and some body to the soup.
Crayfish
Pounded crayfish adds concentrated shellfish flavour and colour.

The step that matters

Strain through a fine cloth. Straining removes the pounded shell and solids that would otherwise leave the soup gritty, so the texture stays smooth.

“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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