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Cray Fish Soup

A soup made with veal broth, French roll crumbs, lobster meat, pounded crayfish tails, and seasoned with cayenne pepper and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Cray Fish Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. In a large pot, combine the veal broth, crumb of French rolls, lobster meat, and pounded crayfish tails.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. Strain the soup through a tamis cloth.

  4. Season with Cayenne pepper and coarse sea salt.

  5. Bring the soup back to a boil.

Finish and thicken

  1. Pound the lobster spawn and mix it with a little flour and water.

  2. Strain this mixture into the soup.

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

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

  4. Veal + meattop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,890 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal broth
Forms the liquid base that carries the soup's flavour.
Crumb of french rolls
Soaks up liquid and helps thicken the soup body.
Crayfish tails
Provide the main shellfish flavour and body of the soup.
Lobster meat
Adds sweet, rich shellfish flavour to the broth.
Lobster spawn
Adds colour and rich shellfish flavour when strained into the soup.

The step that matters

Strain the lobster spawn mixture into the soup. Flour thickens only when heated, so the soup must be at a simmer when the spawn mixture goes in. Adding it cold or straining it in too quickly can leave lumps or a thin, uneven texture.

“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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