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Crab Canapes

A toasted bread appetizer topped with crab mixture, melted cheese, and pimento olives.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Crab Canapes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the bread

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Cut the bread into slices that are 3 inches long and 1.5 inches wide.

  3. Spread butter on the bread slices.

  4. Brown the buttered slices in the oven.

Make the crab mixture

  1. In a bowl, mix the crab meat, lemon juice, Tabasco sauce, salt, onion juice, and olive oil.

Assemble and serve

  1. Mark the browned bread diagonally into four sections.

  2. Spread the sections alternately with melted cheese and the crab mixture.

  3. Separate the sections with finely chopped pimento olives.

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

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

  2. Lemon + olivetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,922 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

  4. Onion + olivetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,779 recipes

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

  5. Bread + olivetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,091 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

Bread
Forms the crisp base that holds the cheese and crab topping.
Butter
Adds richness and promotes golden browning of the bread in the oven.
Crab meat
Provides the main filling and its savoury, seafood flavour.
Melted cheese
Adds richness and a soft, melting texture over the bread.
Olive oil
Adds fat that keeps the crab mixture moist and smooth.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the crab.

The step that matters

Brown the buttered bread fully. Browning dries and crisps the bread surface. Without it, the moist crab mixture and melted cheese soften the slices and make them soggy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, butter, crab, meat, sauce, onion, olive):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Plumfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, crab, meat, sauce, onion, olive. 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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