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Crab Sauce
Mix a dessert-spoonful of flour very smoothly with a little cold water, and pour upon it a tea-cupful of boiling water and a tea-cupful of new milk, also boiling. Add three ounces of fresh butter, half a tea-spoonful of salt, the same of pepper, and a quarter of a nutmeg grated. Put all together on the fire, and stir the sauce constantly till it boils. Now add the flesh from the claws and body of a medium-sized crab, torn into small pieces with two forks. Let the sauce get quite hot; but it must not boil again after the crab is added, or the flavour will be lost. Time, half an hour. Probable cost of crabs, from 10d. to 3s. 6d. each. Sufficient for a tureen.
A thin white sauce enriched with butter and finished with picked crab, meant to be poured over boiled white fish. The whole thing takes ten minutes once the crab is picked; the half-hour in the original includes the cooking of the crab.
- Never boil after the crab goes inThis is the hinge of the recipe and the book is right about it. Boiling picked crab meat drives off its volatile sweetness and turns the flakes stringy. Bring the sauce to a boil to cook out the flour, then take it off the heat before folding the crab through and warming it gently.
- Teacupful and dessert-spoonfulA Victorian teacup is conventionally reckoned at about a quarter-pint, roughly 5 fl oz or two-thirds of a cup, though the book does not define it; on that reckoning you are working with about 1 1/4 cups of liquid in total. A dessert-spoonful is two teaspoons.
- New milkSimply fresh, unskimmed milk straight from the dairy. Whole milk is the equivalent; the cream had not been taken off, so do not substitute skim.
- Butter quantityThree ounces of butter to 1 1/4 cups of liquid gives a very rich, loose sauce that will separate if it sits. Whisk it in off the boil in pieces, and expect to serve it promptly; 1 1/2 to 2 oz is closer to modern taste.
- The flour slurryMixing flour with cold water and then adding boiling liquid is a whitewash thickening rather than a roux, and it needs a full minute at the boil to lose the raw flour taste. Whisk continuously as the boiling liquid goes in or it will lump.
- How much crabA medium crab yields roughly 6 to 8 oz of picked white and brown meat. Refrigerated pasteurised lump crab works, though the brown meat from the body is what carries the flavour here, so use a mixed pick if you can get it.
- Nutmeg and pepperA quarter of a nutmeg is about half a teaspoon freshly grated, which is assertive by current standards; grate less and taste. The recipe says only 'pepper'; white pepper would keep the sauce pale.
- Yield and serving"Sufficient for a tureen" is the book's only guide to quantity; it implies enough to dress a whole plain-boiled or poached fish for a table rather than a single portion. Thin with a spoonful of the fish cooking liquid if it tightens on standing.
Crab sauce belongs to a family of Victorian shellfish sauces built on the same thin milk-and-water base: lobster sauce for turbot, shrimp sauce for salmon, oyster sauce for cod. A single crab could be stretched across a whole tureen and dressed a large plain-boiled fish that would otherwise arrive at table naked. The prices Cassell's quotes, from tenpence to three shillings and sixpence a crab, show the enormous seasonal and regional spread in shellfish costs. The instruction not to reboil the sauce after adding the crab is one of the more reliable pieces of period advice in these books, and it survives unchanged in modern practice; the earlier flour-and-cold-water thickening, sometimes called whitewash, has largely given way to a butter roux.