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Soft Shell Crabs
Dry the crabs, sprinkle them with pepper and salt; roll them, first in flour, then in egg (half a cup of milk mixed in one egg), then in cracker dust, and fry them in boiling lard.
A plain breaded fry that assumes you already know how to dress a crab — the one thing the original never mentions.
- Clean them firstThe recipe begins with dried crabs, but soft-shells must be dressed: cut away the face just behind the eyes, lift each side of the shell and pull out the feathery gills, and remove the apron on the underside. Everything else is eaten, shell included.
- "Boiling lard" means hot fat, not boilingLard does not boil at frying temperature; the phrase simply means fat hot enough to bubble furiously when food goes in. Aim for 350–375F, deep enough to float the crab. Any neutral oil works if lard is not to hand.
- Cracker dustFinely rolled plain soda crackers or water biscuits. Crush saltines to a coarse sand; commercial dry breadcrumbs are a reasonable stand-in but brown faster, so keep the fat toward the lower end of the range.
- The egg washOne egg beaten with half a cup of milk, as the recipe specifies, gives a thin dip, enough for several crabs. Flour first, then egg, then crumbs -- the flour is what makes the wet coating cling to a damp shell.
- TimingTwo to three minutes a side, until the crumbs are deep gold. Soft-shells are small and cook through quickly; longer and the body meat turns dry and the legs go brittle.
- Water and hot fatDry the crabs thoroughly, as instructed, and stand back when they go in. A soft-shell holds a good deal of moisture and will spit.
- YieldTwo crabs per person as a main course, one as a first course. Serve immediately, with lemon, or between slices of soft bread.
- BuyingSold live or freshly killed and cleaned, and only during the molt — traditionally late spring through summer. A live crab should still be limp and yielding; once the new shell has begun to firm, it is no longer worth frying this way.
Soft-shell crabs are ordinary blue crabs, Callinectes sapidus, caught in the few hours after they have shed the old shell and before the new one hardens, which is why the whole animal can be eaten. The trade was built around the Chesapeake, where watermen held "peelers" in floats and pulled them the moment they molted; the arrival of rail lines and iced shipping crates in the second half of the nineteenth century turned a local delicacy into something a Boston or New York cook could reasonably expect to buy, which is how a recipe this brief comes to sit in a general household manual. The instruction to fry in lard rather than butter or oil reflects the fat that was cheapest and most reliably at hand in an American kitchen of the period, and the flour-egg-cracker sequence is the standard breading of the era, applied here as it was to oysters, clams and fish.