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Sauce

Crab Sauce

A sauce made from crab meat, drawn butter, salt, mace, and cayenne.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Crab and butter work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 812 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Crab Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pick all the meat from the crab shell and cut it into small square pieces.

  2. Make ½ cup of drawn butter.

Make the sauce

  1. Add the crab meat to the butter and season with salt, pounded mace, and cayenne.

  2. Warm the mixture gradually and simmer for 2 minutes without boiling.

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Butter + macetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,405 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  3. Crab + macetop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78 recipes

Butter and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,405 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
Provides the main flavour and tender, flaky meat that makes up the sauce.
Drawn butter
Carries the crab meat and adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Warm the mixture gradually and simmer without boiling. Butter emulsions and delicate crab meat can separate or turn tough and grainy if overheated or boiled, so gentle heat keeps the sauce smooth and the meat tender.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, 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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