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Hot Crab

Hot Crab is crab meat mixed with gravy or cream, bread crumbs, baked, and served on toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Hot Crab

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the crab filling

  1. Remove the meat from the crab.

  2. Cut the solid parts into small pieces.

  3. Mix the crab meat with gravy or cream and season with salt and pepper.

  4. Add bread crumbs.

Bake and serve

  1. Fill the crab shell with the mixture.

  2. Place it in the oven and bake at 400°F (200°C) for five minutes on each side.

  3. Prepare six slices of toast and place a crab on top of each slice.

  4. Glaze the crabs with maitre d’hotel butter.

  5. Serve immediately.

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

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

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

Crab meat
Provides the main flavour and the body of the filling.
Rich gravy or cream
Adds moisture so the filling stays soft and does not dry out in the oven.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and thicken the mixture so it holds its shape.
Maitre d’hotel butter
Melts over the surface and encourages browning and a rich finish.

The step that matters

Baking the filled shells. The filling needs enough heat to brown the surface and cook the crab through, but too long in the oven dries out the moisture from the gravy or cream and toughens the crab meat. Watch the timing closely.

“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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