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Crabs
Crabs may be prepared as lobsters. Take the meat from the shell, put into a pan, with butter, pepper, salt, and pinch of mace, and very small quantity of water; dredge with flour and cook slowly a few minutes. Serve hot. Break off the small claws, and lay in rows around the outer edge of the dish.
A plain buttered crab, closer to a quick stovetop fricassee than a casserole. The recipe assumes you have already cooked and picked the crabs, since it opens by referring you to the lobster method earlier in the chapter.
- "Prepared as lobsters" means boiled first"Prepared as lobsters" most likely means boiled first -- the instruction appears to assume whole crabs dropped into salted boiling water, then cooled and picked. As a rough guide, blue crabs take about 10-15 minutes at a rolling boil, Dungeness 15-20; the meat is then flaked, and the dish below is a reheating rather than a cooking.
- Or start with picked meatOne pound of fresh picked crab, roughly the yield of a dozen or more blue crabs or two Dungeness, serves three or four as a light course. Pasteurised tub crabmeat works and needs even less time in the pan.
- The hinge: barely heat it"A few minutes" is the outer limit. Crab is already cooked and shreds into strings if it is stirred hard or held over heat; two to three minutes over low heat, folded gently, is enough.
- "Pan" means a skilletA wide sauté pan over low heat, not a covered baking dish. Use about 3 tablespoons of butter to a pound of meat.
- "Dredge with flour"Here it means dusting flour over the contents of the pan to bind the butter and juices, not coating the crab before frying. A scant tablespoon sifted over the top and stirred in gives a light cling; more turns it pasty.
- "Very small quantity of water"Two or three tablespoons. The crab releases its own liquor, and the sauce should barely coat rather than pool. Cream or milk in place of the water is a period-appropriate enrichment.
- MaceThe lacy covering of the nutmeg seed, warmer and less sweet than nutmeg itself. Ground mace is still sold; an eighth of a teaspoon per pound is a pinch, and blade mace can be used if you fish it out.
- The claw garnishThe small legs are cooked, decorative and largely empty. Rinse them after picking so they are clean enough to handle at table, and arrange them only if you are serving from a platter.
Recipes of this kind were written for cooks who bought crabs alive and cheap, and that abundance may well explain why the book spends no words on them: through the nineteenth century blue crabs from the Chesapeake and the Atlantic seaboard, and Dungeness on the Pacific coast, were among the least expensive things at the fish stall, and the labour of picking them was assumed to be free. The cross-reference to lobster is telling too. Turn-of-the-century American cookbooks are often said to have organised shellfish by method rather than species, so once a reader had learned to boil and pick a lobster, crab, crayfish and shrimp were each handled in a line or two. The seasoning here, butter, pepper, salt and a pinch of mace, is the standard English-derived shellfish palette that predates the spice blends now associated with crab in Maryland and Louisiana, and it survives in the buttered crab and potted crab of British cookery.