Cream Crab
One tablespoon of butter, three tablespoons of flour, one teaspoon of minced onion, one blade of mace, salt and pepper; meat of one crab in rather large pieces; one pint of cream; one egg beaten. Cook onion and mace in the butter. Take spoon and remove onion and mace. Add the flour and cook a minute. Then add cream and cook until it thickens. Season. Add beaten egg and then the crab. When crab is hot, serve on toast.-Mrs D. A. Lindley, Sacramento, Cal.
Shrimps, Newburg Style These are prepared in the chafing-dish.
Use the shrimps which come in glass.
Melt a tablespoon of butter, add the contents of two jars of shrimps, which have been drained and wiped dry, season with a teaspoon of salt and a dash of cayenne, one tablespoon of brandy and two of sherry; cover and cook slowly five minutes. In the meantime, beat the yolks of four eggs thoroughly and add one cup of cream to them. Pour over the shrimps, stir a few moments till creamy and serve immediately, with the celery and homemade finger rolls.
A plain cream sauce built on aromatics, thickened twice — once with flour, once with egg. The page also runs straight into a second recipe, Shrimps, Newburg Style, without a break; both are addressed below.
- The hinge: the eggBeat the egg with a ladleful of the hot sauce before it goes into the pan, and keep the pan below a simmer once it is in. Poured in cold and straight, it scrambles in threads through the sauce.
- Blade of maceA blade is one flake of the dried lacy aril around a nutmeg seed, still sold whole in spice shops. If you only have ground mace, use a scant 1/8 teaspoon and accept that you cannot fish it out again; a few scrapes of nutmeg is the closest substitute.
- How much crab"Meat of one crab" most likely meant a whole Dungeness for a Sacramento contributor, which picks out to roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups. Use 8 to 10 oz of lump or backfin picked crab and fold it in whole so the pieces stay intact.
- Sauce proportionsOne tablespoon butter to three of flour is a dry, unbalanced roux by modern habit. Two tablespoons of butter to two of flour will carry a pint of cream more smoothly, and the egg does further thickening at the end.
- CreamCream of the period was generally lighter than today's heavy cream, closer to what is now sold as light cream. Half-and-half or light cream gives a closer result than modern heavy cream, which with the egg turns almost solid.
- Yield and servingServes three to four on toast. Trimmed white bread, toasted dry and firm, or it collapses under a pint of sauce.
- On the Newburg that follows"Shrimps which come in glass" were jarred shrimp packed in brine, common before home freezing; drained and dried frozen shrimp stand in, about 1 lb for two jars. The chafing dish is simply a low, gentle heat source — a heavy skillet over the lowest burner does the same job, and four yolks in a cup of cream will curdle over anything brisker.
Good Housekeeping's cookbook drew heavily on reader contributions, which is why this entry carries a name and a town: Mrs. D. A. Lindley of Sacramento was cooking with Dungeness crab, landed up and down the northern California coast and sold cooked whole. The dish belongs to the large turn-of-the-century family of creamed shellfish served on toast — crab, lobster, oysters, shrimp — that filled the luncheon and supper pages of American cookbooks, all variations on a béchamel enriched with egg yolk. The Newburg beside it is the more famous branch of that family, generally traced to Delmonico's in New York in the 1870s, and by 1900 it had become a chafing-dish standby: cooked at the table over a spirit lamp, at a period when the chafing dish was fashionable equipment for informal entertaining and jarred shellfish made such cooking possible without a fishmonger.