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Crab Soup
Remove cooked meat from 6 hard-shelled crabs and chop finely. Add 3 cups white stock, 2/3 cup stale breadcrumbs, 1 slice of onion, 1 sprig of parsley, and simmer 20 minutes. Blend together 1 tablespoon Crisco and 1 tablespoon flour, and add 1 cup cream, salt and red pepper to taste. Combine mixtures and bring to boiling point.
A short, thickened crab bisque of the pre-blender era, where stale bread rather than a long-cooked roux carries most of the body. Two things need attention: how much crab meat six crabs actually yield, and the fact that the fat-and-flour paste is never properly cooked.
- Six crabs, in modern termsSix hard-shell crabs of eating size (blue crabs, most likely, given the period) give roughly 3/4 to 1 1/2 cups of picked meat, depending on size. About half a pound to a pound of pasteurized lump or claw crabmeat is a fair substitute; claw meat is generally reckoned to have more flavour and suits a soup better than expensive jumbo lump.
- White stockAn unbrowned stock of veal or chicken bones with aromatics, no tomato and no colour. A light chicken stock works. If you have the crab shells, simmering them in the stock for 20 minutes first and straining will do more for the soup than anything else in the recipe.
- Stale breadcrumbsCrumbs from dry, day-old white bread, not the fine dried crumbs sold for coating. They are the thickener here and will largely dissolve during the 20 minutes of simmering. Two-thirds of a cup gives a soup on the thick side; work down to half a cup if you want it looser.
- CriscoThis book was published to promote Crisco, so the shortening appears where an older cookbook would have said butter. Butter is the better choice for a cream soup and costs nothing in technique.
- The unfinished rouxAs written, the fat-flour paste and the cream are added at the last moment and the pot is only brought to boiling point, which is not long enough to cook out the flour. Cook the fat and flour together for two minutes before whisking in the cream, or the soup will carry a raw, pasty taste.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not chilli flakes. A pinch, added at the end; crab takes very little before the sweetness is lost.
- Do not hold it at a boilOnce the cream is in, bring it just to the point of steaming and take it off. A rolling boil will curdle the cream and toughen the crab, which needs only to be heated through.
- Straining, and yieldFish out the onion slice and parsley sprig before serving; for a smoother soup, blend and sieve the stock-and-crumb base before the crab goes back in. Roughly four to five cups finished, or four first-course servings.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the 1910s and 1920s: the branded cookbook, issued by a manufacturer and organised as a year of menus so that the product turned up in almost every dish. Crisco, a hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, was introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911 and marketed hard as a clean, modern, all-purpose replacement for both butter and lard, which is why a delicate cream soup here begins with a spoonful of shortening. The soup itself is a plain domestic version of a crab bisque, thickened with bread in the older European manner rather than with a long roux, and it reflects a period when hard-shell crabs were cheap coastal food rather than a luxury.