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To Cook Crabs
Take live crabs and put them in cool water, let them remain for half an hour. Then put them in a vessel, pour boiling water on them sufficient to cover them; boil ten minutes. Take them off and wipe them clean, first removing the dead men, and proceed to remove the meat. Take the upper shell, clean it. Season the meat with pepper, salt, mustard, and plenty of butter; put all in the shell again and bake half an hour.--Mr. K. Norfolk.
This is a plain Chesapeake deviled crab: boil, pick, season, return to the shell, bake. Two things in the text will trip a modern cook — the phrase "dead men" and the half-hour bake.
- "Dead men"The feathery grey gills along each side of the body, once believed poisonous and in fact merely unpleasant to eat. Pull them off with the apron and the stomach sac behind the eyes before picking.
- The crabNorfolk means blue crab, Callinectes sapidus. Figure a dozen large crabs to yield about a pound of picked meat, which fills roughly six cleaned top shells.
- The half hour in cool waterThe recipe does not say why. A soak of this kind would rinse off mud and leave the crabs sluggish and easier to handle; it should not be assumed to purge them. Keep them cold and damp until the moment they go in the pot.
- Boiling timeTen minutes at a full rolling boil is right for medium blues; large ones want twelve to fifteen. Add the crabs to water already boiling hard so it recovers quickly, and salt the water generously.
- MustardProbably dry mustard rather than the prepared jarred kind, though the recipe does not specify and both were available; about half a teaspoon per cup of meat. Note that the yellow "mustard" inside the crab is the hepatopancreas, a different thing entirely, and some cooks worked it into the filling for flavour.
- "Plenty of butter"Two to three tablespoons melted butter per cup of picked meat. Without a binder the mixture stays loose; a spoonful of soft breadcrumbs will hold it together and brown on top, though the original does not call for it.
- Baking time and heatHalf an hour is far longer than needed for meat that is already cooked, and it dries the filling out. A hot oven, 400F, for twelve to fifteen minutes — just until the tops are browned and bubbling — gives the result the recipe is after.
- The shellsScrub the top shells well and boil them a few minutes before filling. Reserve only unchipped ones; set them on a sheet pan so they sit level.
Deviled crab in a scrubbed back shell is one of the signature dishes of Tidewater Virginia, where blue crabs were cheap, abundant and worked up by the bushel through the summer. "Deviled" in nineteenth-century cookery simply means sharply seasoned — mustard, cayenne or black pepper — and the same treatment was given to kidneys, ham and eggs. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), edited by Marion Cabell Tyree, was assembled from contributions by Virginia housekeepers credited by initial and place, which is why this one ends with a credit to a Norfolk cook rather than a byline; the book reads as a collective record of what households along the James and the Elizabeth actually put on the table. The warning about "dead men" is often said to predate the book and to have lingered long after it, an inherited caution about the gills that has no real basis beyond their texture.