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Crab Meat on Toast

A creamy crab mixture served over toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 Meat on Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Mix butter, flour, mustard, and paprika together.

  2. Add 3 tablespoons of hot cream and stir into the remaining cream.

  3. Cook for 2 minutes.

  4. Add crab meat and salt, cooking a few minutes longer.

Serve

  1. Serve on hot toast.

  2. For ramekins, add a little butter and cracker crumbs on top.

  3. Brown in the oven for 20 minutes.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Crab + creamtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together317 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetoin (butter, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Crab meat
Forms the main body of the filling, providing the dish's savory flavor.
Flour
Thickens the cream into a smooth sauce that holds the crab together.
Cream
Provides richness and moisture, forming the base of the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and flavor, helping the flour blend smoothly into the sauce.
Mustard
Adds sharpness that balances the richness of the cream and crab.

The step that matters

Adding the flour-butter mixture to the cream. Stirring in hot cream gradually, rather than dumping it in, helps the flour dissolve evenly. Lumps form when starch clumps before it hydrates, and a smooth sauce depends on even thickening.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (crab, meat, cream, flour, butter):

  1. Potatofits about as well
  2. Okrafits about as well
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, meat, cream, flour, 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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