Crab Soup
Open, and cleanse of the deadman's fingers and sandbag, twelve small fat crabs raw. Cut the crabs into two parts. Parboil and extract the meat from the claws, and simply extract the fat from the back shells of the crabs. Scald eighteen ripe tomatoes, skin them and squeeze the pulp from the seeds through a colander. Chop them fine and pour boiling water over the seeds and juice, and strain them. Stew a short time in the soup pot one large onion, one clove of garlic, in one spoonful butter and two spoonfuls lard, and put them in the tomatoes.
After stewing a few minutes, add the meat from the claws, then the crabs, and lastly the fat the back shells. Season with salt, cayenne and black pepper, parsley, sweet marjoram and thyme, one-half teaspoonful lemon juice, and peel of one lemon. Pour in the water, with which the seeds were scalded, adding more should there not be the quantity of soup required. Boil moderately one hour. About a quarter of an hour before serving, sift in grated bread crumbs or pounded crackers as a thickening. Any firm fish prepared by this recipe is excellent.--Mrs. J. I.
Crab Soup.
One dozen crabs to one gallon water. Take of top shell; clear body of crabs. Cut through the middle, put them into a kettle, mix with some butter, and brown them. Then add one gallon water, and simmer for half an hour. Skim slightly, and add the hock of an old ham, and strained tomato juice one pint. Boil two hours. Season with pepper, spice if liked, and half-pint wine. The claws are to be cracked and divested of the jaws. A Hampton recipe.--Miss
Two Chesapeake-style crab soups printed together: the first a tomato-based soup thickened with crumbs, the second a plainer stock built on browned crab, ham and a little wine. Both assume live blue crabs and a cook who knows how to break one down.
- "Deadman's fingers" and the sandbagThe fingers are the feathery gills along each side of the body; the sandbag is the stomach sac just behind the eyes. Both are lifted out after the top shell comes off, along with the apron on the underside.
- The "fat" from the back shellThis is the yellow-brown hepatopancreas, sold today as crab mustard. It is rich and strongly flavored, and the recipe holds it back until last. It is also where environmental contaminants concentrate, so use crabs from a reputable source and go lightly if you are serving children or anyone pregnant.
- Twelve small crabsPresumably live blue crabs, on the small side. The companion recipe below reckons a dozen crabs to a gallon of water; the first recipe leaves the quantity of liquid to the cook. Picked meat will not substitute well here, since the shells and fat do much of the work.
- Spoonful measuresIn books of this period a spoonful generally means a tablespoon unless a teaspoon is specified, so read this as one tablespoon butter and two of lard; a neutral oil or more butter stands in for the lard.
- Eighteen ripe tomatoesDepending on size, roughly 5 to 7 lb of field tomatoes. Two to three 28 oz cans of whole tomatoes, crushed, give a comparable result out of season, though you then lose the seed-water that forms the soup's liquid and will need plain water or a light stock instead.
- Rinsing the seedsPouring boiling water over the seeds and strained juice and using that as the soup liquid is the point of the technique, not a fussy extra step. It recovers the gel and glutamate around the seeds, which is where a good deal of the tomato savor sits.
- The hour's boilCooked at a bare simmer with the crabs still in their shell sections, an hour is defensible: the shells are giving up flavor. Body meat picked from those pieces will be soft, so serve the soup with the shell pieces in it as intended rather than picking the meat first.
- Thickening with crumbsGrated dry bread or pounded crackers sifted in fifteen minutes before serving will keep swelling; add half, wait five minutes, then judge. Start with about 1/2 cup for a gallon.
- The second recipe's ham hockAn "old ham" hock means a dry-cured Virginia country ham, aggressively salty. If you use one, salt the soup only at the end. A supermarket smoked hock is milder and will need seasoning.
- Half a pint of wineA cup of wine into a gallon of soup. Madeira or a dry sherry suits the style better than table wine, and it should go in near the end so it does not cook flat.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, is full of recipes signed with initials and place names, and the second of these two is marked simply "A Hampton recipe" — Hampton sitting at the mouth of the James River, on some of the most productive blue crab water on the Atlantic coast. The pairing shows two lines of Chesapeake crab soup: the tomato-and-vegetable style, and the richer stock built on browned crab, cured pork and fortified wine. The instruction to clean out the gills and stomach and then save the mustard is a blue-crab dressing often described as characteristic of the region, and the closing line — that any firm fish does as well — is characteristic of a book written for households that cooked what the water gave them that week.