Crab Stew
One peck live crabs, steam twenty minutes, bone and pick the claws and bodies. Stew with one pint milk or cream, the flesh and eggs of the crabs, fifteen minutes. Flavor with salt and cayenne pepper.--Mrs. R. L. O.
Four lines, one of which will ruin the dish if followed literally. Crab meat that has already been steamed needs only to warm through in the milk.
- The fifteen minutesPicked crab stewed a quarter of an hour turns stringy and loses its sweetness, and the milk will likely catch or curdle. Bring the milk barely to a simmer, add the meat and roe, and hold it below a boil for three to five minutes.
- A peck of crabsA peck is 8 dry quarts, which for Chesapeake blue crabs is something like a dozen and a half to two dozen medium ones, or roughly 10-12 lb live weight. Expect on the order of 1 to 1½ lb of picked meat, which is the number to work from if you buy the meat already picked.
- "Bone and pick"Break off the apron and top shell, discard the gills and the sand sac, then pick the body chambers and crack the claws. Work over a bowl so you catch the juices, and go through the meat once more for shell fragments before it goes near the milk.
- The eggsThe roe of a mature female crab, orange and firm after steaming. It is what gives this stew its colour and much of its flavour; if your crabs are all males, or you are using pasteurised meat, the stew will be paler and blander, and a spoonful of butter helps compensate.
- Milk or creamOne pint against a pound of crab is a thin stew by modern expectations, closer to a bisque base than a chowder. Whole milk works but scorches easily; half milk, half cream is more forgiving.
- Steaming the live crabsTwenty minutes over hard-boiling water is right for medium crabs in a single layer. Crowd the pot and the top layer will be underdone, so work in batches and let them cool enough to handle before picking.
- SeasoningSalt and cayenne only, so both matter. Season the milk before the crab goes in, taste at the end, and keep the cayenne restrained enough that the crab still reads as crab.
- YieldAs written this serves four as a first course, or two or three as a supper with bread. It does not reheat well; the second warming is what makes crab rubbery.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, edited by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878-79, gathered contributions from some two hundred and fifty women in Virginia and neighbouring states, many of them credited only by initials as this one is. The dish itself belongs to the Chesapeake, where blue crabs were cheap and abundant enough to be bought by the peck rather than the pound, and where a stew of picked meat in milk was a familiar way of using an afternoon's catch. Recipes of this kind assume a cook who already knows how to steam and pick crabs and needs only the proportions, which is why the instructions are four lines long. The call for the crabs' eggs suggests a dish made with mature females, though the roe meant here is the internal roe, not the external egg mass of a 'sponge' crab, which is what modern conservation rules restrict.