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Devilled Crabs (To the flesh of one dozen)
To the flesh of one dozen crabs boiled fifteen minutes and picked free from shell, add: 3 tablespoonfuls of stale bread crumbs. 1/2 wine glass of cream. Yolks of 3 eggs. A little chopped parsley. 1 tablespoonful butter. Salt and pepper to the taste.
Put them in the shell and bake in a quick oven.--Mrs. M. E. L. W.
A spare late-19th-century formula that assumes you have a dozen crabs, their cleaned shells, and a hot oven. The proportions are for a dozen crabs, so scale carefully if you are working with picked meat bought by the pound.
- Crab yieldA dozen boiled blue crabs of eating size give roughly 1 to 1 1/2 cups of picked meat, very roughly 8 to 16 ounces depending on size and how thoroughly they are picked. If you are starting from a container of lump crabmeat, a pound with the filling below will likely be a generous amount for a dozen shells.
- Wine glassA wine glass in 19th-century American receipts is usually reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, which would make half a glass roughly 2 tablespoons of cream. That is a small amount by design; the egg yolks and crumbs do most of the binding.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400 to 425F in modern terms; the book gives no temperatures. The crab is already cooked, so the bake is only to set the yolks and brown the tops, on the order of 12 to 15 minutes.
- Where the devil isThe recipe as printed has no mustard or cayenne, which is what usually earned the name. Season assertively with pepper, and dry mustard or cayenne if you want the dish to answer to its title.
- The shellsReuse only the hard top shells, scrubbed and boiled clean; discard the gills and internal organs. If you have no shells, small ramekins or scallop dishes work and are easier to handle.
- CrumbsStale bread crumbs means dry crumbs from real bread, coarser and thirstier than the fine commercial kind. Three tablespoons is enough to bind, not to bulk out; add a scattering more on top with a little butter for browning.
- YieldA dozen filled shells serves six as a first course, or four as a light main dish.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878, with later issues dated 1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions signed with initials like the "Mrs. M. E. L. W." here, drew on Tidewater kitchens where blue crabs from the Chesapeake and its rivers were cheap, seasonal and handled in quantity. "Devilled" had meant sharply seasoned since around 1800, generally applied to dishes lifted with mustard, cayenne or pepper and browned; the crab version, served back in its own shell, appears in Maryland and Virginia cookbooks in the second half of the century, and dishes of the same family are still sold along that coast. That the recipe begins by assuming you boiled and picked twelve crabs yourself, and says nothing about where to get them, suggests how ordinary they were on a Virginia table.