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Crab, Hot or Buttered
Pick the meat from the shell of a fine crab, and mix it with a little salt, pepper, and grated nutmeg, a few bread-crumbs, a spoonful or two of salad-oil or good cream, and vinegar. Fill the shell with the mixture, strew finely-grated bread-crumbs over it, and heat it in the oven or before the fire. Garnish the dish with parsley, and send toasted bread to table with it. Time to prepare, three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost of crabs, from 10d. to 3s. 6d. each. Sufficient, a medium-sized crab for three or four persons.
A dressed crab reheated in its own shell, close to what a modern kitchen would call baked crab or crab au gratin. The whole thing hangs on brief heating: the crab is already cooked, so the oven is only warming it through and browning the crumbs.
- Start with cooked crabThe recipe assumes a boiled crab, whole and cold, as it was sold. A dressed crab from a fishmonger works, as does the picked white and brown meat of one large crab or two smaller ones, or purchased pasteurised crab meat.
- "A fine crab"A large brown crab, the usual crab of British markets; a fine specimen would run to a couple of pounds or more. Blue crabs and Dungeness will not fill a shell the same way; use a gratin dish if the shell is too small or too fragile.
- Use both meatsThe original says only "the meat," but the brown meat from the body carries most of the flavour and binds the mixture. Keep it in, and mix it with the crumbs before folding in the flaked white meat so the white stays in visible pieces.
- Oven heat and timeThe instruction is only to warm the crab through and colour the crumbs. A hot oven, around 400F for 15 to 20 minutes, or a few minutes under a broiler, will do it. Long baking dries the meat and turns it stringy. The three-quarters of an hour is given as time to prepare, chiefly picking the crab, not baking.
- Salad-oilOlive oil, sold in Victorian Britain as salad oil. Cream gives the richer result of the two options; about 2 tablespoons of either is right for a medium crab.
- Vinegar, unmeasuredNo quantity is given and the amount matters. A teaspoon or two of malt or white wine vinegar sharpens the brown meat; more will curdle cream and read as sour. Lemon juice does the same job.
- Clean the shellIf you are serving in the shell, scrub the inside, discard the gills and stomach sac, and press or trim the ragged inner edge back to the natural dark line so it looks deliberate.
- YieldThe original's three or four persons is a first course or a light lunch with the toast. As a main dish, count one medium crab for two.
Cassell's appears to place this among a run of crab treatments "hot or buttered" near the cold dressed crab, and the pairing tells you how crab was eaten in Victorian Britain: bought ready-boiled from a fishmonger or a coastal hawker, then picked, seasoned and returned to its own shell at home. The shell served as both cooking vessel and serving dish, which may help explain why so many nineteenth-century crab and scallop recipes specify it. Nutmeg with shellfish, which reads oddly now, was a common English seasoning inherited from the eighteenth century, when grated nutmeg went into everything from oyster loaves to potted lobster. The price note, 10d. to 3s. 6d., spans a considerable range, presumably reflecting the size of the crab and the distance from the coast: fresh shellfish was cheap where it was landed and dear inland, and cookbooks of this period routinely quoted a spread rather than a figure.