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Crab

A boiled crab served in its shell with butter, bread crumbs, nutmeg, salt, pepper, vinegar, and lemon garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Crab

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crab

  1. Boil the crab until cooked, then let it cool.

  2. Pick out all the meat from the shell and divide it into small pieces.

  3. Mix the rich part of the meat with the rest and moisten with salad dressing.

Fill and warm

  1. Return the mixture to the shell, garnishing with sliced lemon around the edge.

  2. If serving hot, mix the meat with nutmeg, salt, pepper, butter, and bread crumbs.

  3. Add vinegar and place the mixture back in the shell.

  4. Set the shell before the fire to warm, optionally browning with a salamander.

Serve

  1. Serve in the shell with dry toast.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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, with rich meat that gives it flavour.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and add body to the mixture when served hot.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour and helping the mixture brown when warmed.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the rich crab meat.

The step that matters

Set the shell before the fire to warm. Heating gently keeps the crab meat moist and warm without toughening it. Too much heat dries the meat and can scorch the butter and crumbs before the dish is hot through.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

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