Home › Shell Fish › Deviled Crabs
Deviled Crabs
12 nice, heavy crabs. 1/2 pint of cream. 2 tablespoonfuls of flour 14 of a nutmeg, grated Yolks of four hard boiled eggs 1 tablespoonful of salt 1 tablespoonful of butter 1 tablespoonful of chopped parsley Salt and cayenne to taste Put the crabs in warm water, add the salt, and put the kettle over a brisk fire. Boil thirty minutes. Take up and drain; break off all the claws, separate the shells, remove the spongy fingers, and the stomach, which will be found under the head. Pick out all the meat. Put the cream on to boil; rub the butter and flour together and add to the boiling milk; stir and cook for two minutes. Take from the fire and add the crab meat, the yolks of the hard boiled eggs mashed fine, the parsley, the nutmeg, salt and cayenne. Clean the upper shells of the crabs, fill them with the mixture, brush over with beaten egg, cover with bread crumbs and put in a quick oven to brown; or better, put them in a frying basket and plunge into smoking hot fat or oil until a nice brown.
The printed ingredient list is garbled and incomplete — the crabs themselves and the cream are never quantified, though both are called for in the method. Work from a dozen hard-shell blue crabs and about a cup of cream, and treat the list below as the corrections that matter.
- Missing quantitiesThe list omits the crabs and the cream entirely. A dozen live hard-shell blue crabs yields perhaps half a pound of picked meat, which the given 2 tablespoons of flour, 1 tablespoon of butter and about a cup of cream will bind. The text also drifts between "cream" and "milk" in the same sentence; either works, cream more richly.
- That tablespoon of saltIt belongs in the boiling water, not the filling. Seasoning for the mixture itself is the separate "salt and cayenne to taste" at the end of the list.
- Thirty minutes is too longBlue crabs are done in 12 to 15 minutes at a hard boil; half an hour leaves the meat stringy and washed out. Cook until the shells are uniformly red-orange, then drain and cool enough to handle.
- "Spongy fingers"These are the gills, the feathery grey-white strips along each side of the body under the top shell. Pull them off with the stomach sac and discard. The mustard-yellow hepatopancreas may be left in or removed to taste.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400 to 450F. The filling is already cooked, so the oven is only setting the crumbs — eight to ten minutes on an upper rack, or a minute or two under the broiler.
- If you fry instead"Smoking hot fat" reads as about 375F. Chill the filled shells first so the mixture holds together, and lower them in gently; a wet filling in hot fat spits badly.
- The shellsOnly the top shells are used as cases. Scrub them inside and out and boil them briefly if they have sat about. Ramekins or scallop shells do the job if the crab backs break.
- NutmegA quarter of a whole nutmeg is close to half a teaspoon grated — assertive by current taste. Start with a quarter teaspoon.
- YieldAbout eight to twelve filled shells, enough for four to six as a first course or four as a light supper with bread and a salad.
"Deviled" had meant highly seasoned with mustard, cayenne or both since the early nineteenth century in British and American cookery, applied to kidneys, ham, bones and eggs long before crab; the sense is heat rather than any particular technique. Deviled crab in a shell is associated with the mid-Atlantic and Chesapeake blue crab trade, where the emptied back shells made free serving dishes, though versions were current elsewhere along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. The deviled-crab croquette later became a fixture of Gulf Coast and Florida cooking, though a direct descent from this dish is not something that can be demonstrated.