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Mussel Soup with Crawfish

A seafood soup made with mussels, crawfish, fish, vegetables, and bread crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 22 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsnip and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,097 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Mussel Soup with Crawfish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the broth

  1. Cover the cleaned mussels in a stew-pan and steam until open.

  2. Remove the mussels from their shells.

  3. Strain the cooking liquid through a fine sieve.

  4. Boil the fish in water with sweet herbs, onion, pepper, parsley, horseradish, and salt until reduced by half.

  5. Strain the broth.

Make the soup

  1. Return the broth to the pot and add 20 mussels, mushrooms, truffles, and leek.

  2. Fry the sliced parsnip and carrot in butter until browned.

  3. Add the browned parsnip and carrot to the soup.

  4. Remove the crusts from the French rolls.

  5. Fry the crumbs until brown.

  6. Add the browned crumbs to the soup.

  7. Let the soup boil for 15 minutes.

Finish

  1. Fry the remaining mussels with butter, water, and a little flour until crisp.

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. Parsnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  2. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Parsnip + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together306 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  4. Almond + parsniptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together33 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Mussels
Provide the main seafood flavour and, once shelled, tender pieces in the soup.
Butter
Browns the parsnip, carrot and crumbs, adding nutty flavour and richness.
French rolls
Their browned crumbs thicken the soup and add body and toasted flavour.
Flour
Helps the remaining mussels crisp and bind the coating.
Parsnip and carrot
Browned in butter for sweetness and a deeper, savoury flavour in the soup.

The step that matters

Fry the remaining mussels with butter, water, and a little flour until crisp. Surface moisture must evaporate for the flour and butter to brown and crisp rather than steam. Too little heat or too much water leaves them soft and pale.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (almond, parsnip, carrot, butter, fish, onion, clove):

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against almond, parsnip, carrot, butter, fish, onion, clove. 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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