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To Dress Crab, Hot

A baked crab filled with a mixture of butter, anchovy essence, oil, vinegars, 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: 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 ↓

To Dress Crab, Hot

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Pick the crab and place all the meat in a stew pan.

  2. Add butter, anchovy essence, oil, vinegar, elder vinegar, chili vinegar, and bread crumbs.

  3. Mix well and fill the crab shell with the mixture.

Bake

  1. Top with more bread crumbs and drizzle with clarified butter.

  2. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until browned, using a salamander if necessary.

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. Crab + anchovytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together79 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Anchovy + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,260 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanol (green, fruity).

  5. Butter + anchovytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,697 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Crab
Provides the main body of the dish and the sweet, delicate meat that fills the shell.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the filling and helps the top brown.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and give the filling body, while the topping crisps and browns in the oven.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavor and cuts the richness of the crab and butter.

The step that matters

Browning the top. The topping must brown without drying the filling. Bread crumbs and clarified butter brown through Maillard browning at high heat, so the surface needs enough fat to colour evenly while the filling stays moist. A salamander can finish the top if the oven does not brown it.

“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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