Home › The Principles of Cookery › Crab, to Dress
Crab, to Dress
Pick out all the meat from two crabs and mix all well together with a wine-glassful of vinegar, the same of oil, a salt-spoonful of salt, a table-spoonful of mustard, and a tea-spoonful of white pepper. Clean out one of the large shells, put the mixture into it, and place it on a napkin with the small claws, and a little parsley for garnish. Time to prepare, three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost of crabs, 10d. to 3s. 6d. each. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A Victorian dressed crab, assuming the cook starts with crabs already boiled and cooled. The seasoning is aggressive by modern standards and worth scaling to taste.
- The crabs are cookedThe recipe opens at picking, so it presumes two boiled crabs, cooled. Buy them ready-cooked from a fishmonger, or boil live crabs yourself; either way the meat should be cold before dressing.
- What to throw awayDiscard the feathery grey gills attached to the body (the "dead man's fingers"), the stomach sac just behind the mouth, and any green-grey membrane. Everything else, brown meat included, goes into the mix.
- A wine-glassfulA wine-glassful is conventionally reckoned at about 2 fl oz (60 ml). Four fluid ounces of vinegar and oil between two crabs will drown the meat; start with a tablespoon of each and build up.
- Salt-spoonfulA salt-spoon is about a quarter teaspoon.
- The mustardA tablespoon of English mustard powder would be brutal. Read it as made mustard, and even then a teaspoon is plenty against the sweetness of white crab meat.
- Keep the meats separate firstPick brown and white meat into separate bowls, dress the brown with the vinegar, oil and seasoning, then fold the white through at the end. Mixing everything at once shreds the white meat to paste.
- The shellScrub one carapace, then tap along the faint line inside the front edge and snap away the frilly section so the shell sits flat and holds more. Scald it and dry it before filling.
- YieldPicked yield from crab varies widely, very roughly a quarter to a third of the live weight, so two crabs will not go far. Five or six servings works only as a first course with bread and butter; for a main course, count on one crab per two people.
- Keep it coldPicked crab meat spoils quickly. Dress it, refrigerate it, and serve within a day.
Dressed crab is a fixture of British cold tables, and Cassell's treats it as an assembly job rather than a cooked dish: the labour is in the picking, which is why three-quarters of an hour is allotted and no fire is mentioned. The price range quoted, tenpence to three shillings and sixpence apiece, prices crabs individually, and most likely reflects how big a crab you were buying. Serving the filled shell on a folded napkin with the small claws arranged around it belongs to the same convention that returned a boiled salmon to its own shape or a game bird to its feathers: the dish should announce what it had been. The oil-and-vinegar-and-mustard dressing here is closer to a sharp salad dressing than the mayonnaise-bound versions often said to have become standard in the twentieth century.