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Devilled Crab
After crabs are picked, season with mustard, pepper, salt, and catsup to taste. Add olive oil or butter.
Cover with bread crumbs moistened with milk and lumps of butter (put a little milk in the crab also). Bake in the shells or in a pan.--Miss E. W.
A recipe written for a cook who already knew the dish: no quantities, no temperature, no time. The proportions below are the ones the method implies rather than anything the original states.
- Start with cooked crab"After crabs are picked" assumes whole blue crabs steamed or boiled, cooled, and the meat hand-picked. A pound of pasteurized lump or backfin crabmeat stands in for roughly a dozen medium crabs; pick it over for shell and cartilage before seasoning.
- The mustard is dryThe mustard is probably dry -- Mustard in a recipe of this period most often means dry mustard powder, though prepared mustard was also to be had. Start with a teaspoon per pound of meat and taste; with the pepper it is what gives the dish its "devilled" edge.
- Catsup did not mean tomatoCatsup may not mean tomato -- Nineteenth-century catsups were often mushroom or walnut, thin, dark and intensely savory, though tomato catsup was also common in American kitchens by the 1870s. A tablespoon of Worcestershire, or mushroom ketchup if you keep it, gives the salty-funky note; modern tomato ketchup is considerably sweeter.
- Keep the mixture loose but not wetThe milk stirred into the crab and the milk moistening the crumbs are there to keep the meat from drying. A few tablespoons total is plenty; too much and the filling steams into a paste instead of setting.
- Oven and timeThe original states neither temperature nor time. Baking at about 375F for roughly 20 minutes, until the crumb top is browned and the centers are hot, suits it. The crab is already cooked, so the oven is only browning and heating through; long baking dries the meat and toughens it.
- Baking in the shellsUse the scrubbed top shells (backs) of the crabs, boiled a few minutes and dried, or ceramic crab-shell dishes. Set them on a sheet pan so they sit level. A shallow gratin dish works identically and is easier.
- YieldOne pound of crabmeat fills six to eight shells, enough for four as a first course or three as a main with something green alongside.
Devilled crab belongs to the Chesapeake, where blue crabs were cheap and abundant enough that a Virginia household cookbook could assume a reader had a bushel to pick. "Devilled" is an English term, generally traced to the late eighteenth century, for anything sharpened with mustard and cayenne and browned, and it attached itself readily to crab, which takes assertive seasoning well. Recipes like this one — contributed by initials, written as a reminder rather than a set of instructions — are typical of Housekeeping in Old Virginia, which Marion Cabell Tyree assembled in the 1870s from the recipes of some 250 Virginia housekeepers. The absence of quantities is not carelessness: the book was compiled for women who had cooked the dish before and needed only the order of operations.