Skip to main content
Main

Deviled Crabs

Deviled crabs are crab meat stuffed in shells with a creamy, spiced filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Crab and meat work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 448 recipes. Both carry 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine, which smells cocoa, roasted. The science ↓

Deviled Crabs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Press the hard-boiled yolks through a sieve.

  2. Scald the cream.

  3. Mix the butter and flour thoroughly.

  4. Add the butter-flour mixture to the cream and stir constantly over heat until boiling and very thick.

  5. Remove from heat and stir in all other ingredients.

Fill and fry

  1. Fill the shells, rounding slightly on top.

  2. Brush the surface of the filling with beaten egg, letting it extend slightly over the edge of the shell.

  3. Sprinkle with dried bread crumbs.

  4. Fry in hot, deep fat.

  5. Serve immediately with sauce tartare or slices of lemon.

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

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

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  4. Crab + creamtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together317 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetoin (butter, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Boiled crab meat
Forms the main body of the filling and provides the seafood flavour.
Thin cream
Becomes a thick sauce with the flour, giving the filling its creamy moisture.
Flour
Thickens the cream into a very thick base that holds the filling together.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and combines with flour to form a roux for thickening.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Add richness and body, helping the filling set and hold its shape.

The step that matters

Cook the cream and flour until very thick. The sauce must boil and thicken fully, because a thin base will not hold the filling in the shells and may make the crab mixture watery.

Swap the parsley

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, meat, cream, flour, butter, egg, onion. 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

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesMeat CroquettesMeat Croquettes52 recipesCrab SoupCrab Soup39 recipesMeatballsMeatballs37 recipes