For Decorating
One and a half ounces of Coral Butter.
One and a half ounces of Green Herb Butter.
One and a half ounces of Butter.
Mix the oil, vinegars and seasoning.
Break off the legs and claws, and remove the flesh with a skewer. Underneath the crab all around will be found a dark mark in the shell; knock well on the inside of this and the piece will break away. Remove the flesh, being careful not to use that which is greenish-looking and mixed with curious coarse hairs. Keep some nice white shreds for garnish and mix the remainder of the flesh with the dressing. Wash and dry the shell and put the mixture into it.
Sprinkle that kept for garnish on top and pipe a row of bright red coral butter around the edge of the shell. Next put a row of green butter, and then one of plain white butter. Serve up on a lace paper.
This is the tail end of a dressed crab, printed under a decorating heading, so it opens with the three piping butters and assumes you already have a cooked crab and a made vinaigrette to hand. Read it as a finishing method rather than a complete recipe.
- The crab must already be cookedThe instructions begin at picking, not boiling. Use a whole crab that has been boiled and cooled, or ask the fishmonger for one cooked; nothing here brings raw shellfish to temperature.
- The greenish flesh with coarse hairsThese are the gills, still commonly called dead man's fingers, and the discard instruction is the hinge of the whole recipe. They are not poisonous but are unpleasantly bitter and fibrous, and should go, along with the stomach sac behind the eyes.
- The dark mark in the shellThat line around the underside of the carapace is the natural break line. The recipe has you knock firmly on the inside of it so the piece breaks away, leaving a bowl you can wash and dry for serving.
- Coral butterButter pounded with the coral, the orange roe of a hen crab or lobster, then sieved. Only hen crabs carry it, and not reliably out of season; a little tomato paste or paprika in softened butter gives the same red for the piping if the coral is absent.
- Green herb butterPeriod green butter is made by blanching parsley, tarragon or spinach, pounding it, and working the pulp through a sieve into softened butter. Modern blender versions work, but the butter must be chilled to piping firmness or the rows collapse.
- The dressing is not quantified"The oil, vinegars and seasoning" points back to a dressing given elsewhere, either earlier in the same recipe or in another part of the book; either way no proportions are supplied here. A conventional oil-and-vinegar dressing with mustard, salt and cayenne would suit, but that is a modern guess, not the original.
- Piping temperatureThree concentric rows of butter around a shell edge need butter soft enough to force through a star tube but firm enough to hold its shape. Chill the filled shell before piping and return it to the refrigerator afterwards.
- YieldOne dressed shell makes a first course for one or two, depending on the size of the crab; the original gives no weight or serving count. The lace paper is a doily under the shell on the serving dish, and is purely presentation.
Dressed crab served back in its own scrubbed shell is a fixture of British cookery from the Victorian period onward, and the elaboration here — three piped butters in coloured rings around the rim, the whole thing set on a lace paper doily — is often associated with the late nineteenth-century school of high-class cookery, where a cold table dish was judged as much on its outline as its flavour. Coloured compound butters were part of the standard garnishing kit of that kitchen: coral butter for red, herb or spinach butter for green, plain butter for white, each sieved smooth and piped with the same tubes used for meringue. The wariness about the gills is thoroughly practical; the name "dead man's fingers" is traditional rather than documented in any single source.