Why it works: Crab and pepper work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 922 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓
Scalloped Crabs
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the crabs
Wash the crabs to remove sand.
Boil the crabs in a kettle of water with a handful of coarse sea salt for 20 to 30 minutes.
Remove the crabs from the water and pick out all the meat without breaking the shells.
Season
Season the crab meat with salt and black pepper to taste.
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.
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Crab + peppertop 15% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together922 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
- Crabs
- Provide the main meat, which is cooked by boiling and then picked out of the shells.
- Black pepper
- Adds a mild, sharp aroma to the seasoned crab meat.
The step that matters
Picking the meat without breaking the shells. Boiled crab shells are fragile and can crack while the meat is removed. Careful picking keeps the shells intact and keeps stray shell fragments out of the meat.
“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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