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Crab, Curried, Canapes Of
Remove the meat from the shell of a crab, and pound it in a mortar with a piece of butter the size of a walnut. Season with curry-powder, salt, pepper, lemon-juice, nutmeg, mustard, and cayenne; moisten with a little tarragon vinegar. Have ready some small rounds of fried bread, scooped out in the centre. Fill the cavities with the mixture, sprinkle over with bread-crumbs, bake for ten minutes in the oven, and serve hot. Probable cost, 1s. 3d.
A late-Victorian savoury: potted curried crab baked in little fried-bread cups. The original assumes you have a cooked crab in the shell and a mortar; both are easily worked around.
- How much crabOne medium dressed crab yields roughly 6-8 oz (175-225 g) of white and brown meat combined. Picked crab from a tub works perfectly well; use both white and brown, as the brown carries most of the flavour that stands up to curry powder.
- A piece of butter the size of a walnutAbout 1 oz, or 30 g, by the usual Victorian equivalence. It is enough to bind the pounded meat into a paste; there is no need to increase it.
- PoundingA food processor does this in seconds, but pulse rather than run it, and stop while a little texture remains. Fully pureed crab bakes into a dense, pasty mass.
- Seasoning with a light handSix seasonings are named on top of curry powder. Period curry powders varied a good deal in strength, so start with a scant teaspoon, and treat the mustard, nutmeg and cayenne as pinches. Season, taste, then adjust before filling the cases.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and worth using: it supplies the anise note that ties the nutmeg and mustard together. A teaspoon is enough. Cider vinegar with a bruised tarragon sprig steeped in it for an hour is a reasonable stand-in.
- The bread casesCut rounds about 1 1/2 in. across from day-old bread, scoop a shallow well with a small spoon, and fry in butter or oil until golden before filling. Fresh bread soaks up fat and collapses under the filling.
- OvenThe crab is already cooked, so the ten minutes only heats it through and colours the crumbs. Use 375F (190C) and watch the bread edges, which brown fast having been fried already.
- YieldOne crab fills about 12 small canapes, enough for four to six as a savoury or with drinks. Serve hot from the oven; they turn leathery as they cool and do not reheat well.
Canapes of this sort belong to the British savoury course, the small hot mouthful served after the sweet at a formal Victorian and Edwardian dinner, and a fixture of the period's cookery books. The curry powder is not incidental: by the time Cassell's was compiled, commercial curry powder had been sold in Britain for something approaching a century, and it was applied freely to shellfish, eggs and leftover meat as a general savoury seasoning rather than as a gesture at Indian cooking. The costing in shillings and pence is a standard feature of the dictionary, meant to let a cook judge a dish against the household budget; at 1s. 3d. this was a modest way to stretch a single crab across a table.