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Deviled Crab
When the crabs are boiled, take out the meat and cut it into small pieces; clean well the shells. To six ounces of crab meat mix two ounces of bread crumbs, two hard-boiled eggs chopped, the juice of half a lemon, cayenne pepper and salt. Mix all with cream or cream sauce, or, what is still better, a Bechamel sauce. Fill the shells with the mixture, smooth the tops, sprinkle over sifted bread crumbs, and color in a quick oven.
A straightforward baked crab stuffing that assumes you started with live crabs and kept the shells. The only vague step is the binding, which the original leaves entirely to judgement.
- QuantitiesSix ounces of picked crab meat is about 1 cup, and two ounces of fresh bread crumbs is roughly 1 cup loosely packed. That fills two to four crab shells depending on size, and serves two as a first course.
- "Colour in a quick oven"A quick oven is generally taken as roughly 400-425F. The filling is already cooked, so this is browning only: 10-15 minutes, or a few minutes under the broiler until the crumb topping is gold.
- Bind it wetThe recipe never says how much sauce, and this is where it fails. Use about 1/2 cup of thick Bechamel to the above quantities. Underdressed, the mixture bakes into dry crumb; overdressed, it slumps out of the shell.
- BechamelTwo tablespoons butter, two tablespoons flour, one cup milk infused with onion and a bay leaf, cooked until it coats a spoon; reduce the milk a little if you want it thick enough to hold in the shell. Season it before it meets the crab, and taste before adding the salt the recipe calls for.
- ShellsScrub the top shells with a brush in hot water and dry them well; discard the gills, the mouthparts and the stomach sac behind the eyes. Ovenproof ramekins or scallop shells work identically if you buy picked meat.
- Crab meatPasteurised lump or claw meat from a tub is a fair substitute. Pick it over for cartilage and shell fragments, and do not shred it further than the recipe asks, since the point of the dish is distinguishable pieces of crab.
- CayenneThe seasoning is deliberately warm. Start at a scant 1/8 teaspoon for this quantity and add more to taste.
- Two hard-boiled eggsThey are a stretcher as much as a flavouring. If you want the crab to read more clearly, drop to one egg and add crumbs to compensate.
Deviled crab belongs to a whole family of nineteenth-century "devilled" dishes, in which cooked meat, poultry or shellfish was chopped, sharpened with cayenne, and browned - the word is attested in the sense of fiercely seasoned from at least the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Serving the mixture back in its own scrubbed shell was standard practice for crab, lobster and scallop alike, and the shell functioned as both cooking vessel and presentation, which may be why the recipe bothers to say "clean well the shells" before it says anything about seasoning. The three-tier choice offered here - cream, cream sauce, or "what is still better, a Bechamel" - is a small snapshot of a moment when French sauce technique was filtering into general household books as the mark of a better table.