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Crab, Devilled
Take the meat from a crab; put one ounce of butter into a saucepan with a little cayenne and salt, add a table-spoonful of curry-powder, one of Worcester sauce, a tea-spoonful of anchovy sauce, and half a cupful of white sauce (bechamel); when boiling add the meat of the crab. Serve with rice. Probable cost, 1s. 3d.
A brisk late-Victorian curry-devil built on a spoonful of prepared sauces. The only real technical demand is that the crab meat goes in at the last moment.
- Add the crab off the boilThe instruction to add the meat "when boiling" is the hinge, and it is worth softening: crab is already cooked, and more than a minute or two at a rolling boil turns white meat stringy and dry. Bring the sauce to a simmer, take it off the heat, then fold the meat through to warm.
- Quantities of crabA dressed crab of the period would yield roughly 6-8 oz of picked meat, white and brown together. That is one generous serving or two modest ones with rice; picked crab meat from a fishmonger works identically, and the brown meat carries most of the flavour.
- White sauce (bechamel)The Victorian cupful was not a standardised measure, so half a cupful is somewhere in the region of 3-5 fl oz. Bechamel in books of this period is a milk-based white sauce, sometimes enriched with cream or made with a little stock; a plain roux-thickened milk sauce, on the loose side, is right here. Thin it with a spoonful of milk if it tightens as the crab warms.
- Curry powderA tablespoon of curry powder in this small a quantity of sauce is assertive but not absurd; commercial blends of the period are generally reckoned to have leaned on turmeric and coriander and to have been milder than many modern ones. Start with two teaspoons of a contemporary powder and taste.
- Anchovy sauceA thin bottled condiment of anchovy, vinegar and spice, still sold in Britain. Half a teaspoon of anchovy paste or a dash of fish sauce stands in; it is there for salt and depth, not fishiness.
- Salt with careWorcester sauce, anchovy sauce and curry powder all bring salt, and crab is naturally saline. Season only at the end.
- The riceNo quantity is given. Plain boiled long-grain rice, about 2 oz dry per person, suits it -- the devilled crab is a sauce to be spooned over it rather than a stuffed shell.
- Cost note1s. 3d. is pre-decimal: one shilling and threepence. It is a costing for the household accounts, not an instruction.
"Devilled" in nineteenth-century British cookery meant nothing more precise than seasoned hot -- cayenne, mustard, a peppery bottled sauce -- and it was applied to almost anything that could be reheated: bones, kidneys, biscuits, whitebait, crab. The technique earned its keep at breakfast and supper, where it made second-day meat and shellfish worth serving again, and it belonged to the gentlemen's-club and chafing-dish end of the repertoire. This particular version shows how far the bottled-sauce trade had reached into the domestic kitchen by the time Cassell's was compiled: Worcester sauce, anchovy sauce and commercial curry powder do all the seasoning work, with only butter and a spoonful of bechamel supplied by the cook. Curry powder in a devil also points to the long Anglo-Indian traffic in spice blends, which by the later 1800s were a pantry staple in Britain rather than an exotic import, and served here simply as a shortcut to heat and colour.