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Crab Butter
Pick the meat from the claws of a large crab. Bruise it well in a mortar, and mix it with a little fresh butter. Put the mixture into a saucepan with a table-spoonful of water, and let it simmer, gently stirring it all the time. When it is on the point of boiling, take it from the fire and press it through a sieve into a basin, which must stand in cold water until the butter is cold. Time, a few minutes to simmer. Probable cost of crabs, from 10d. to 3s. 6d. each, depending upon the size. Sufficient, the flesh from two large claws, for half a pound of butter. Suitable for a breakfast relish.
A compound shellfish butter of the potted-meat family: crab claw meat pounded, warmed through butter, sieved smooth and set cold. The whole trick is heat control.
- Never let it boilThe instruction to pull it off "on the point of boiling" is the hinge. Butter held at a rolling boil separates and the crab protein tightens into grit, so the sieved result turns granular instead of silky. Keep it barely trembling and take it off early.
- The crab must already be cookedPicking meat from the claws implies a crab already boiled. Start with cooked white claw meat — fresh picked, or a good tub of pasteurised handpicked white — since the few minutes of simmering here will not cook raw shellfish through.
- ProportionsThe flesh of two large claws to half a pound of butter (about 225 g). The recipe gives no weight for the picked meat; as written it is a mild, spreadable butter, and a heavier proportion of meat to butter gives a stronger, coarser paste.
- The mortar, or a shortcutPounding in a mortar gives a finer, more even paste than a food processor, which tends to whip air in and warm the butter. If you use a machine, pulse briefly and keep everything cold.
- The spoonful of waterIt is there to keep the butter from catching, not to thin the mixture; do not add more.
- Sieving and settingPress through a fine sieve while warm and fluid — it will not go through once it stiffens. Standing the basin in cold water sets the butter fast so the crab stays suspended rather than sinking into a layer at the bottom; stir once or twice as it firms.
- PricesThe costing is pre-decimal sterling: 10d. is ten pence, 3s. 6d. is three shillings and sixpence. The wide range reflects size, and nothing about the method depends on it.
- Yield and keepingHalf a pound of butter plus the claw meat, served at breakfast on hot toast or melted over grilled white fish. It is a fresh dairy-and-shellfish preparation with no salt cure or clarified seal, so refrigerate it and use within two or three days.
Compound butters of this kind — crab, lobster, anchovy, shrimp — sat in the Victorian larder somewhere between a condiment and a store cupboard economy. A crab yields plenty of body meat for a salad or a dressed shell, and the claws, which are fiddly to pick and coarser in texture, may well have been turned into something pounded and sieved instead, though the habit is not well documented. Cassell's places it among breakfast relishes, the class of savoury spreads that furnished the morning table alongside potted meats and bloaters in households that took a substantial cooked breakfast. The technique descends from the older English practice of potting, where meat or fish was pounded with butter and sealed under a layer of clarified butter to keep; this version drops the seal and the long keeping, which is why it reads as a fresh butter rather than a preserve.