Mock Crabs
4 tablespoons butter 1/2 cup flour 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 3/4 teaspoon mustard 1/4 teaspoon paprika 1 1/2 cups scalded milk 1 can Kornlet 1 egg 3 teaspoons Worcestershire Sauce 1 cup buttered cracker crumbs Melt butter, add flour mixed with dry seasonings, and pour on gradually the milk. Add Kornlet, egg slightly beaten, and Worcestershire Sauce. Pour into a buttered baking-dish, cover with crumbs, and bake until crumbs are brown.
A cream-of-corn panada seasoned to suggest deviled crab, from the era when "mock" dishes stretched or replaced expensive shellfish. Two things need translating: the vanished brand-name ingredient and the missing oven temperature.
- KornletA canned scraped green-corn pulp sold in the United States in the early twentieth century, no longer made. The closest stand-in is about a cup of milky pulp scraped from fresh sweet corn cobs, or canned cream-style corn, which is sweeter and starchier and may need the milk cut back slightly.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives none. Bake at 400F; the mixture goes in already cooked, so all the oven does is set the egg and colour the crumbs, roughly 20 to 25 minutes.
- The sauce is meant to be stiffHalf a cup of flour to a cup and a half of milk makes a paste, not a pouring sauce, which presumably helps the mixture hold its shape under the crumbs. Cook the roux and milk until thick before the corn goes in.
- MustardDry mustard powder, not prepared mustard. Mixing it into the flour with the salt and paprika keeps it from going lumpy and bitter.
- Temper the eggBeat the egg with a spoonful of the hot base before stirring it into the pan, or it will scramble in a mixture this thick and this hot.
- Buttered crumbsToss the cracker crumbs with two to three tablespoons of melted butter before scattering them. Dry crumbs on a moist filling scorch at the edges and stay pale in the middle.
- ServingThe recipe specifies a single buttered baking-dish, though comparable deviled-crab dishes of the period were often baked in individual scallop shells or ramekins if you want the crab illusion. As written it fills roughly a one-quart dish and serves four to six as a light entree.