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Deviled Crabs
1 doz. crabs 1/2 cup butter 1/2 teaspoon mustard 1 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne Bread crumbs Put the meat in a bowl and mix with it an equal quantity of fine bread crumbs. Work the butter to a light cream, add seasonings and stir, a little at a time, the mixed crabs and crumbs. Fill the crab shells with the mixture, sprinkle buttered bread crumbs over the top, brown quickly in a hot oven.
A late-Victorian stuffed-shell preparation that assumes you have boiled and picked the crabs yourself, and that you have kept the top shells. Everything hinges on that assumption.
- The crabs are already cookedThe recipe takes for granted that the dozen crabs have been boiled and picked. A dozen blue crabs yields roughly 1 to 1 1/2 cups of picked meat; a pound of good lump crabmeat is a fair substitute if you are buying rather than picking.
- "Mustard" here is the condimentHalf a teaspoon of dry mustard powder, not the yellow hepatopancreas inside the crab that Chesapeake pickers also call mustard. Any plain dry mustard powder will do; what exact style the cook of 1900 would have had on the shelf is not something the recipe tells us.
- A hot ovenRead this as 425-450F. The filling is already cooked through, so the oven is only there to set the butter and colour the crumbs -- eight to ten minutes, or a few minutes under the broiler.
- Equal crumbs is a lot of crumbsOne part crumbs to one part crab is a large proportion of filler by modern taste; a third to a half that much is generally preferred, and the result still holds together well enough with the creamed butter.
- Cream the butter properlyThe butter is worked to a cream the way you would for a cake, then the crab and crumbs are folded in a little at a time. Cold butter cut in will leave greasy pockets rather than binding the mixture; there is no egg here doing that job.
- The shellsUse the top shells (carapaces), scrubbed hard and boiled for a few minutes before filling. Small ovenproof ramekins do the same work if you have no shells, though the portion will be larger.
- Buttered crumbsToss fresh crumbs with melted butter before scattering them, or they will scorch dry at that heat rather than browning.
- YieldTwelve filled shells, which serves four to six as a first course or three or four as a light main dish.
To "devil" a dish meant to season it sharply with mustard and cayenne, a usage current in British cookery from the late eighteenth century and applied freely to kidneys, bones, ham and eggs before it reached shellfish. Deviled crab in stuffed shells is particularly associated with the American Atlantic seaboard -- Baltimore, the Chesapeake and the Gulf ports -- where blue crabs were cheap and the shells came free with the meat.