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Dessert

Crab Cakes for Breakfast or Lunch

Crab cakes made with cooked crab meat, red pepper, sea salt, butter, flour, egg, cracker crumbs, fried in butter or lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Crab and meat work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 448 recipes. Both carry 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine, which smells cocoa, roasted. The science ↓

Crab Cakes for Breakfast or Lunch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a bowl, combine the picked crab meat with red pepper and coarse sea salt.

  2. Add butter and a little flour to form round cakes.

Coat and fry

  1. Dip each cake in beaten egg, then coat with fine cracker crumbs.

  2. Fry the cakes in hot butter or lard until golden brown.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Crab + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together922 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Cooked crab meat
Forms the main body and flavor of the cakes.
Egg
Binds the cakes and helps the cracker crumbs adhere.
All-purpose flour
Helps the mixture hold its shape as round cakes.
Fine cracker crumbs
Forms a crisp, browned outer coating when fried.
Butter
Adds richness and promotes browning during frying.

The step that matters

Fry the cakes in hot butter or lard until golden brown. Frying in hot fat sets the crumb coating quickly and drives browning through the Maillard reaction. If the fat is not hot enough, the cakes absorb oil, turn greasy, and may break apart before the coating crisps.

“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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