Home › Dressed Fish › Suprême de Crabe à la Tomate
Suprême de Crabe à la Tomate
Take all the meat out of a crab, and to each pound add the following :- Four ounces of stale Bread-crumbs.
One gill of Tomato Sauce.
The Juice of one Lemon.
A little Salt. The Peel of a quarter of a Lemon.
Five very thin slices of Lemon.
Salt and Pepper to taste.
One glass of Chablis, or more if the crab is very dry. Simmer gently for a quarter of an hour, taking care that it does not burn. Before serving, bring it just to the boil; serve in the shell, and garnish with fried parsley.
Tartelettes à l'Indienne.
Ingredients.
Twelve large Oysters.
One Shalot chopped fine.
One Carrot (cooked).
Half a gill of Cream.
One teaspoonful of Curry Powder.
Half a teaspoonful of Lemon-juice.
Half an ounce of Flour.
One ounce of Butter.
A late-Victorian dressed crab, closer to a hot ragoût than the cold dressed crab most cooks know. Note that the block of oyster ingredients at the end belongs to the following recipe, Tartelettes à l'Indienne, and has nothing to do with the crab.
- The instruction that mattersCrab meat is already cooked, and a quarter-hour simmer plus a return to the boil will make it stringy and dry. Warm the mixture through over low heat for five minutes at most, just until the sauce binds, then serve.
- A gillIn British measure a gill is a quarter of a pint, about 5 fl oz (roughly two-thirds of a cup). So one gill of tomato sauce to each pound of picked crab meat.
- One glass of ChablisA period wineglass measure was nearer 2 fl oz, so read this as a small glass of dry, unoaked white wine, with more added if the crab is dry, as the recipe itself allows. Chablis here means the French appellation, not the generic jug wine later sold under the name; any lean Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc does the job.
- Stale bread-crumbsFour ounces of dry crumbs is about a cup, and it is a lot — it will make a firm, stuffing-like mixture. If you want the crab to taste of crab, start with half and add more only if the mixture is loose.
- A pound of crab meatThat is the yield of one to two large brown crabs, depending on size. Buying picked white and brown meat is simpler; the brown meat carries most of the flavour and thickens the mixture.
- The tomato sauceNot ketchup. A Victorian tomato sauce is a cooked, sieved, lightly seasoned tomato purée, so use passata reduced a little, or a plain tomato coulis.
- Lemon peel and slicesUse the zest of a quarter lemon only, pared thin and free of pith. The recipe does not say what becomes of the five thin slices; laying them over the top before serving, rather than simmering them in, is one way to handle them.
- Serving in the shellScrub and dry the top shell, trim the ragged edge, and use it as the dish. One pound of mixture serves four as a first course, two as a light main.
- Fried parsleyWhole dry sprigs dropped into hot fat for a few seconds until they stop sizzling and turn brittle and bright green. They must be absolutely dry going in.
The name is late-nineteenth-century restaurant French: suprême, taken from poultry cookery where it denoted the choicest cut, came to be applied loosely to refined dishes of picked meat, and à la tomate signalled a fashionable ingredient. Dressing crab — picking the meat, seasoning it and returning it to the cleaned shell for the table — is a technique older than the French title, and still standard in Britain and Ireland. The use of a named white wine and a garnish of fried parsley suggests a book aimed at comfortably-off households rather than at plain family cooking.