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To Dress a Crab

A sauce made with crab meat, wine, spices, bread crumbs, egg yolk, and vinegar, served as a dressing for crab.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,015 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

To Dress a Crab

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. Remove the skin from the crab meat and place it in a saucepan.

  2. Add the white wine, nutmeg, pepper, and coarse sea salt.

  3. Heat over low heat.

  4. Add a few crumbs of bread.

  5. Beat the egg yolk with vinegar and add to the saucepan.

  6. Shake the saucepan for one minute.

Serve

  1. Serve on a plate.

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

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

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

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

  3. White wine + vinegartop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,776 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  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 dressing and provides its flavour.
Egg yolk
Emulsifies and thickens the mixture as it gently heats, giving it a creamy texture.
White wine
Adds acidity and liquid that loosens the mixture and carries the seasonings.
Bread crumbs
Soak up liquid and help bind the dressing into a thicker consistency.

The step that matters

Heating the egg yolk mixture over low heat. Egg yolk thickens when heated gently, but too much heat can scramble it. Keeping the heat low and shaking the pan helps the yolk thicken smoothly.

Swap the nutmeg

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, meat, white wine, pepper, bread, egg, vinegar. 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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