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Devilled Crabs

A baked crab dish seasoned with bread crumbs, spices, butter, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Devilled Crabs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the meat from the crab shell.

  2. Mix the crab meat with bread crumbs, white pepper, salt, Cayenne, and grated nutmeg.

Assemble and bake

  1. Return the mixture to the shell, then add the small lumps of butter.

  2. Squeeze lemon juice over the mixture.

  3. Cover with a thick layer of bread crumbs.

  4. Bake until golden brown.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  4. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

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

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

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 and carries the seasoning.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and add body, and form a crisp, browned top.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture and helps the top brown.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich crab and butter.

The step that matters

Bake until golden brown. Baking too long dries the crab and toughens the filling, while too short leaves the crumb top pale. Watch colour rather than time, since browning comes from the Maillard reaction on the bread crumbs and butter.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, meat, bread, pepper, nutmeg, butter, lemon. 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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