Crab Soup
Cut in small pieces 4 good-sized tomatoes that have been washed and wiped (or use half a can of tomatoes). Mash and rub them through a strainer fine enough to take out all the seeds. Pour boiling water over the seeds and skim to extract all the juice, and strain this off also. Put this strained tomato in a saucepan with a clove of garlic, 1 onion, a small red pepper, and a tablespoonful of butter, and stew half an hour. Add a cupful of crab meat without the fat; pour over it boiling water enough to make 3 pints in all. Season with minced parsley, sweet marjoram, a spoonful of lemon juice, more salt if necessary, and, lastly, the fat of the crab. Simmer slowly for an hour, thicken slightly with bread crumbs, and serve.
A tomato-based crab soup of the Chesapeake and Gulf type, built on a strained tomato base rather than a roux. The one thing worth changing is when the crab goes in.
- Hold the crab backAn hour of simmering will shred picked crab meat into threads and flatten its flavour. Build and simmer the tomato base for the full time, then add the crab meat in the last five minutes and the crab fat off the heat.
- Crab fatThis is the mustard-coloured matter from inside the body of the crab, added at the end as an enrichment. If you are working from picked lump meat you will not have any; a spoonful of butter stirred in at the end stands in for the body, though not the flavour.
- How much crabA cupful of picked meat is roughly 6-8 oz, which depending on the size of the crabs may take anywhere from about four to eight steamed blue crabs. Lump or backfin holds together best given the brief cooking.
- Half a can of tomatoesCanned tomato sizes varied in this period, and the recipe simply treats half a can as the equivalent of four good-sized fresh tomatoes, which is around 1 1/2 lb.
- The seed waterPouring boiling water over the strained seeds and pulp and skimming it is simply a way of rinsing out the last of the juice. It is worth doing when tomatoes are dear; a splash of water swirled through the strainer achieves the same thing.
- Small red pepperA small hot red pepper, fresh or dried; the recipe does not say whether it is left in or lifted out. Modern equivalent is a generous pinch of cayenne or one small dried chile.
- Garlic and onionThe recipe does not say whether these are left whole or chopped. If chopped fine, the soup then wants a brief blitz or it will be lumpy under the smooth tomato.
- ThickeningFine dry bread crumbs, a tablespoon at a time, whisked in and given two or three minutes to swell. The soup should be barely bodied, not porridge-like.
- YieldThree pints, which serves four generously or six as a first course.
Crab soups thickened with bread rather than flour are a long-standing coastal habit on both sides of the Atlantic, and this one sits comfortably in the American tomato-and-crab tradition of the Chesapeake and the Gulf. The instruction to reserve the crab fat and stir it in last suggests a cook working with whole crabs, where the mustard was too good to waste and too delicate to boil; the same reflex shows up in she-crab soup, where the roe goes in near the end. Sweet marjoram, listed here alongside parsley, was a common kitchen-garden herb in nineteenth-century America and appears more often in period cookbooks than it does now.