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Crab Creole

A creamy crab dish with onions, peppers, tomato, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and tomato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,923 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Crab Creole

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Chop onions and peppers very finely.

  2. Combine butter, onions, peppers, salt, and red pepper in a stew pan.

  3. Stew slowly for 10 minutes.

  4. Add the peeled tomato and stew until dissolved.

Thicken and finish

  1. Mix flour with cream.

  2. Add the mixture to the pan, stirring until thickened.

  3. Fold in the finely-picked crab.

  4. Serve on toast.

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 + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Cream + crabtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together317 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetoin (butter, cream).

  5. Butter + crabtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together812 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

Butter
Adds richness and carries the flavour of the onions and peppers as they stew.
Flour
Thickens the cream mixture so the sauce becomes smooth and clings to the crab.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, forming the body of the sauce with the flour.
Tomato
Adds acidity and sweetness, breaking down into the base to flavour the sauce.
Finely-picked crab
Provides the main protein and delicate sweet flavour of the dish.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour and cream into the pan. Flour must be fully blended with the cream before it goes in, and the pan stirred constantly, so the starch thickens evenly without lumps forming in the sauce.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Okrafits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, pepper, flour, cream, crab. 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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