Home › The Principles of Cookery › Crab, Scalloped
Crab, Scalloped
Prepare the crab as for MINCED CRAB, omitting the wine and eggs. Clean out the large round shell of the crab, fill it with the mixture, and put what is left into scallop-shells. Place them in a moderately hot oven or before a clear fire. When hot through and lightly browned, take them up, put them on a dish covered with a napkin, the crab-shell in the middle and the scallop-shells round it, and garnish with parsley. Time, about half an hour. Probable cost of crab, from 10d. to 3s. 6d. Sufficient, a medium-sized crab for four persons.
A Victorian way of serving dressed crab hot, using the cleaned body shell as the serving dish. The recipe leans on an entry it assumes you have already read, so the first job is reconstructing the filling.
- What "as for Minced Crab" meansThe recipe assumes you have read the minced crab entry, which is picked crab meat bound and warmed through; all we know for certain from this page is that it contains wine and beaten egg, both omitted here. A workable reconstruction is picked brown and white meat with fresh breadcrumbs, butter and a little cream or stock, seasoned with mustard, cayenne, salt and lemon — roughly 8 oz crab meat to 2 oz crumbs and 1 oz butter, slackened with a spoonful or two of cream.
- The half hour is for the shell, not the crabThe crab is already cooked; this step only heats and browns, so half an hour in a hot oven risks drying the meat. Around fifteen minutes in a moderately hot oven, or five to eight minutes under a hot grill with buttered crumbs on top, gives the same lightly browned surface.
- Oven temperature"Moderately hot" has no fixed value in a book of this date; modern usage generally puts it somewhere around 375-400F, which is a serviceable guess here. "Before a clear fire" means propped facing a bed of glowing coals with no flame — the direct radiant heat of a modern grill or broiler element is the nearest equivalent.
- Buying the crabThe book does not define 'medium-sized'; a brown crab of about 2 to 2 1/2 lb, yielding perhaps 8 to 10 oz of picked meat, would serve four as the recipe intends. Buying a dressed crab from a fishmonger saves the picking and usually arrives with the shell already cleaned.
- Preparing the shellDiscard the gills ("dead men's fingers") and the stomach sac behind the mouth. Scrub the shell, then pour boiling water through it before filling — an old shell that has sat in the fridge is not a clean vessel.
- Scallop shellsDeep scallop shells were standard kitchen equipment for baked-and-browned portions. Small ramekins or shallow gratin dishes of about 1/2 cup capacity do the same work; heat them on a tray so the bases brown too.
- The prices10d. to 3s. 6d. is tenpence to three shillings and sixpence, a wide spread that presumably reflects the size of the crab and the market. It has no useful modern equivalent.
- Yield and serviceThe recipe gives a medium crab as sufficient for four; treat that as a first course, or two as a light supper. The napkin under the dish is the conventional presentation for shells, and has the practical effect of keeping them from sliding.
Serving a dish back in its own shell is long established in British fish cookery, and by the later nineteenth century dressed crab, hot or cold, was a familiar dish. Cassell's places it among a family of scalloped dishes: anything minced, sauced and browned in a shell or shallow dish, a category that also took in oysters, lobster, salmon and cold roast meat. Real scallop shells were kept and washed for reuse, which is why recipes of the period call for them by name without explaining where to get them. The reason for omitting the wine and eggs used in the minced version is not given.