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Crayfish Soup

A soup made from crayfish, butter, French rolls, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Crayfish and butter work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 343 recipes. Both carry anethole, which smells sweet, anise. The science ↓

Crayfish Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crayfish

  1. Remove the gut from the crayfish tails to avoid bitterness.

  2. Boil the crayfish in salted water until they turn red.

  3. Pick the meat from the tails.

Make the soup

  1. Pound the bodies of the crayfish with ½ lb of butter.

  2. In a stewpan, combine the pounded crayfish, 2 French rolls, and fish or meat stock; heat gently for 1 hour without boiling.

  3. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve.

  4. Add the crayfish tails back into the soup and serve.

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. Crayfish + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together343 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  2. Butter + fishtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

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

  3. Crayfish + fishtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together90 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the soup with fat, adding richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
French rolls
Thicken the soup and give it body as they absorb liquid and break down.
Crayfish
Provide the main flavour and shell-derived aroma that the soup is built on.

The step that matters

Heat gently without boiling. Boiling can break the emulsion of butter and fat and make the soup grainy or cloudy, and can toughen the delicate crayfish meat. Keeping the heat gentle over the full hour keeps the texture smooth.

“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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