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Crayfish Au Gratin

A baked dish of crayfish tails and fish mixed with béchamel sauce, anchovy essence, pepper, salt, and topped with bread crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sauce and anchovy are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,057 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Crayfish Au Gratin

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Split the tails of the crayfish and pick all the fish from the claws and other parts.

  2. Cut the fish into small pieces and mix with a little béchamel sauce, anchovy essence, pepper, and salt.

Fill and bake

  1. Fill the shells with the fish mixture and top with bread crumbs.

  2. Bake until golden brown, similar to lobster au gratin.

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. Sauce + anchovytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Fish + anchovytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together637 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Crayfish + anchovytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together61 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Crayfish + saucetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together195 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Fish + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Crayfish tails
Provide the main sweet, delicate shellfish meat that forms the body of the dish.
Fish from claws
Adds more picked crayfish meat, extending the filling and its shellfish flavour.
Béchamel sauce
Binds the chopped fish and keeps the filling moist so it does not dry out in the oven.
Anchovy essence
Adds savoury depth that enhances the seafood flavour of the filling.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp topping that browns in the oven, giving the gratin its golden crust.

The step that matters

Bake until golden brown. The filling is already cooked through, so the bake mainly browns the topping. Over-baking dries the béchamel and toughens the crayfish, while underbaking leaves the crumbs pale and the filling loose.

“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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