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Devilled Crabs (After the crabs are boiled)
After the crabs are boiled, pick them up fine and add one third the quantity of crab, in cracker dust or bread crumbs, mustard, red and black pepper, salt, and butter. Return them to the top shells, and bake.--Mrs. D.
A contributor's shorthand note rather than a worked recipe: no quantities, no oven temperature, no time. The one fixed proportion given is the important one, and everything else has to be judged by eye.
- The proportion is the recipeCrumbs at one third the quantity of picked meat (the recipe does not say whether by weight or bulk) is the whole structure of the dish. Anything more and it turns into a bread pudding with a crab flavour; this is a crab cake mixture in a shell, not a stuffing.
- How much crabA dozen boiled blue crabs yield roughly a pound of picked meat, which with about 5 oz of crumbs and 3-4 tablespoons of butter fills eight to ten top shells. Figure two shells per person as a first course.
- Cracker dustFinely rolled plain soda or water crackers, not sweetened crumbs. Saltines pulverised in a food processor are the nearest thing; if you use dry breadcrumbs instead, cut back on the added salt.
- Mustard means the powderAn unqualified "mustard" in a seasoning list of this date most likely means dry mustard powder, though prepared mustard cannot be ruled out. A teaspoon or so for a pound of meat, worked into the melted butter so it disperses.
- Red pepperCayenne. With the black pepper and mustard it supplies the "devilling" — the heat should be assertive enough to notice, around a quarter teaspoon per pound to start.
- Bind itButter alone leaves the mixture crumbly by modern taste. Melted butter loosened with two or three tablespoons of cream or a beaten egg gives the filling something to set with, and the crumbs should be folded in last so the lumps of meat survive.
- The shellsOnly the top carapace is used. Scrub the shells and boil them for a few minutes before filling; commercially sold ceramic crab shells or small ramekins do the same job.
- OvenNo temperature is given, as was usual before oven thermometers were common. The filling is already cooked, so this is browning only: 375-400F for 15-20 minutes, with extra crumbs and dotted butter on top, until the surface colours.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, is a book of signed contributions — "Mrs. D." is one of hundreds of contributors, ladies, as the title page has it, "in Virginia and her sister states," and many entries read as reminders to a cook who already knew the dish. Devilled crabs belong to the Chesapeake, where blue crabs were cheap and abundant, and the labour of picking them was routine domestic work rather than a luxury. "Devilled" is an English term of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for anything sharpened with mustard and cayenne and usually browned; it was applied to kidneys, bones, biscuits and, along the American coast, to crab. Serving the mixture back in the cleaned top shell was both practical and a bit of show, and the convention long outlived the era of open hearths and unmeasured ovens that produced this note.