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Deviled Crabs
Lob- Pick the meat from a boiled crab and cut in fine bits, add onethird as much bread-crumbs, two or three chopped hard-boiled eggs, and lemon juice; season with pepper, salt, and butter or cream. Clean the shells nicely and fill with the mixture, sprinkle over with bread-crumbs and small bits of butter, and brown in oven. sters may be prepared in same way, and served in silver scallopshells. Or, boil one pint milk, and thicken with one table-spoon corn starch mixed in a little cold milk, season with pepper (cayenne may be used) and salt, and pour over the picked-up lobster; put in baking-dish, and cover with bread-crumbs and a few pieces of butter, and brown in oven. -Mrs. Col. S., Norfolk, Va.
A straightforward crab stuffing baked in the cleaned shells, with a lobster variation appended. The whole dish depends on already-cooked shellfish, so the oven stage is only about heating through and browning.
- Don't overbakeThe crab is fully cooked before it goes in. Ten to fifteen minutes in a hot oven is enough to set the mixture and colour the crumbs; the recipe itself gives no temperature. Longer and the meat turns dry and stringy.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe says only "brown in oven." A hot oven, or a few minutes under the broiler at the end, is all the browning requires.
- QuantitiesOne boiled crab yields very little picked meat. Figure on about 1 lb picked crabmeat (roughly 3 cups) with about 1 cup fine dry breadcrumbs, which is the recipe's "one-third as much," and 2-3 hard-boiled eggs to fill six to eight shells; scale the lemon, butter and seasoning to taste.
- The shellsOnly the top shells of large crabs are worth keeping. Scrub them, boil them briefly to sterilise, and dry before filling. Small ovenproof ramekins or scallop shells do the same job.
- Butter or creamThe first version is bound only by egg and crumb, so it needs enough softened butter or cream to hold together, about 2-3 tablespoons. Test a spoonful for moisture before filling the shells.
- The lobster variationOne pint milk thickened with a single tablespoon of cornstarch gives a thin, pourable sauce, deliberately so; it should coat the meat, not set into a paste. Cook it a full two minutes after it thickens to lose the raw starch taste.
- CayenneThe suggested cayenne is worth taking up. Shellfish gratins of this kind are flat without some heat, and a pinch of cayenne or a few drops of hot sauce does more than black pepper.
- ServingServe immediately with lemon wedges; the crumb topping softens within minutes of leaving the oven.
Deviled crab was a fixture of Atlantic and Gulf coast cooking through the nineteenth century, "deviled" signalling nothing more than sharp seasoning, mustard, cayenne or lemon, applied to a rich food. Filling and baking in the cleaned top shell was both economical and decorative, and the practice survives in Maryland crab imperial and in the Tampa deviled crab croquette. That this version reaches an Ohio cookbook by way of a contributor in Norfolk, Virginia, is characteristic of Buckeye Cookery, which carried recipes from women in far-flung places with their initials and towns printed beside them. For an inland household in 1877, crab and lobster would have arrived canned or not at all, and the silver scallop shells mentioned for the lobster version mark this as a dish for company rather than a weekday supper.