Skip to main content
Main

Crab Curried

A crab dish simmered in curry sauce with shallot, apple, and butter, served over rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mustard and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 859 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Crab Curried

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crab

  1. Remove the meat from the crab, including the claws, and flake it up.

  2. Sprinkle a little dry mustard over the crab meat.

Make the curry

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan and lightly fry the shallot and apple for a few minutes.

  2. Add the curry sauce to the saucepan, then add the crab meat to the saucepan.

  3. Reheat gently.

Serve

  1. Serve the crab mixture on a hot dish in the center of a border of rice.

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. Mustard + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together859 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Mustard + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together599 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  3. Shallot + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together284 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Crab + saucetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together238 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Crab
Provides the main protein and sweet, delicate flavor of the dish.
Dry mustard
Adds sharp, pungent heat that balances the richness of the curry.
Butter or other cooking fat
Carries the aromatics and adds richness and flavor to the base.
Shallot or onion
Softens during frying to add savory sweetness and depth.
Apple
Softens while frying, adding gentle sweetness and acidity that offsets the curry.
Curry sauce
Supplies the spiced liquid that coats the crab and carries the flavor.
Rice
Forms a starchy border that absorbs the sauce and sets off the crab mixture.

The step that matters

Reheat gently. Crab meat is delicate and toughens and becomes rubbery when overheated. Gentle heat warms it through while keeping it tender and moist.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, mustard, butter, shallot, sauce, rice. 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.

You might also like

Rice FrittersRice Fritters84 recipesSteamed RiceSteamed Rice48 recipesCrab SoupCrab Soup39 recipesApple SoupApple Soup33 recipes