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Crab Butter Sauce
Take half a pint of good melted butter, and stir into it while hot a piece of butter about the size of an egg, prepared as in the last recipe. Mix well together, and serve. Time, a few minutes. Probable cost of crabs, from 10d. to 3s. 6d. each. Sufficient for a small dish of fish.
A two-line finishing sauce that depends entirely on two things the original assumes you already know: what Victorian cooks meant by "melted butter", and what the previous recipe's crab butter actually is.
- "Melted butter" is not melted butterIn nineteenth-century English cookery the term means a flour-thickened butter sauce: butter and flour worked together, then let down with water or light fish stock and simmered smooth. Proportions vary from book to book; something in the order of an ounce of butter with a little flour to half a pint of liquid gives the right consistency. Pour plain melted butter over fish and you will get a greasy slick, not a sauce.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups or 285 ml. Made as above it should coat a spoon but still pour.
- The crab butter itself"Prepared as in the last recipe" points back to a preceding entry for crab butter, which on the usual pattern would be the soft brown meat and creamy contents from inside the shell pounded smooth with butter. Whatever the exact proportions given there, sieve it: fragments of shell and membrane ruin the texture.
- A piece the size of an eggAround 2 oz, 50-55 g, of the compounded crab butter. Add it off the heat in small pieces, whisking each in before the next.
- Do not let it boilThis is the hinge. Once the crab butter goes in, the sauce must be kept below a simmer or the emulsion breaks and the brown meat turns grainy. Warm it through and serve at once.
- SeasoningThe original assumes the crab butter was already seasoned. Taste at the end for salt, a little cayenne, and lemon juice, which the brown meat needs to keep it from tasting flat and heavy.
- Cost and yieldThe prices are Victorian: 10d to 3s 6d is tenpence to three shillings and sixpence per crab. The original claims only that it is enough for "a small dish of fish", and it suits plain poached or grilled white fish rather than anything already rich.
Melted butter was the workhorse sauce of the English kitchen for well over a century, so ubiquitous that a well-worn quip, usually pinned on Voltaire, has it that the English had only one sauce and served it with everything. Cassell's treats it as a base to be varied rather than a dish in itself, which is why this entry can be three sentences long and still cross-reference the recipe above it. The variation here uses the soft brown meat of the crab, the creamy matter from inside the carapace, worked into butter and sieved. It is thrifty in a way the period admired: the white claw meat went to the table as a dish, and the brown, too strong and too soft to serve alone, was turned into flavouring. The same logic produced lobster butter, anchovy butter and shrimp butter, compound butters that were standard entries in Victorian sauce chapters.