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Deviled Crabs

A creamy crab filling made with milk, butter, flour, egg yolks, parsley, salt, and red pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Deviled Crabs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Scald the milk in a saucepan.

  2. In a bowl, beat together the butter and flour until smooth. Add the butter and flour mixture to the scalded milk and stir until it thickens.

  3. Remove from heat and mix in the mashed egg yolks, parsley, salt, and red pepper.

Assemble and bake

  1. Add the crab meat and mix well. Bake in the crab shells or in a baking dish until heated through.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the white sauce that binds the filling.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor to the sauce and helps it stay smooth.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a sauce that holds the crab together.
Hard boiled egg yolks
Enrich the sauce with fat and help it set into a creamy filling.
Crab meat
Provides the main flavor and texture of the filling.

The step that matters

Thickening the sauce. Flour must be fully mixed into the butter and then into the hot milk, and stirred until it thickens, so the sauce cooks through and loses its raw starch taste. Lumps or undercooked flour leave the filling pasty.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, butter, flour, egg, pepper, crab, meat):

  1. Nutmegfits about as well
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Cinnamonfits about as well
  4. Capersfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, flour, egg, pepper, crab, meat. 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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