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To Dress Crab Cold

A chilled crab salad with bread crumbs, anchovy essence, vinegar, and spices, garnished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

To Dress Crab Cold

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crab

  1. Pick out all the soft meat from the crab body and claws, placing them on separate plates.

Make the filling

  1. In a bowl, combine the soft body meat with bread crumbs, salt, cayenne, essence of anchovy, salad oil, vinegar, elder vinegar, and a small amount of butter. Mix all ingredients well in a mortar or bowl.

Assemble and serve

  1. Clean the crab shell and fill it with the mixture.

  2. Arrange the claw meat around the filled shell and garnish with parsley.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  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

Soft crab meat
Forms the main body of the salad and gives it its flavour.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the liquids and help bind the crab meat into a spreadable mixture.
Salad oil
Adds moisture and richness, keeping the filling soft and smooth.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the rich crab meat.
Essence of anchovy
Adds a salty, savoury depth to the filling.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Garlicfits about as well
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Thymefits about as well

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