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Fried Soft-shell Crabs
Prepare crabs by removing sand bags. Raise apron; cut from crab; remove spongy substance surrounding apron. Wipe; season with salt and pepper; dip in crumbs; egg and crumb; fry in hot fat about three minutes. Serve immediately with tartare sauce.
A terse set of directions that assumes you have handled live soft-shells before. The cleaning is the part that needs unpacking; the frying is straightforward once the fat is at the right temperature.
- "Sand bags" means the gillsThe paired, feathery gray structures under the pointed sides of the top shell, sometimes called dead man's fingers. Lift the shell flap on each side and pull them out. Also snip off the face just behind the eyes and press out the stomach sac.
- The apronThe hinged plate on the underside — pointed on males, broad and rounded on mature females. Twist and pull it off; the "spongy substance" the recipe mentions around it is the soft tissue at the base, which should be pulled or scraped clear. The shell itself is eaten whole.
- Buy them aliveSoft-shells should be moving when you get them. They spoil quickly once dead, and a limp, ammonia-smelling crab should be discarded rather than cooked. Clean them just before frying, not in advance.
- "Egg and crumb" is the standard three-stage breading"Egg and crumb" -- The recipe gives three stages: a first dip in crumbs to dry the shell so the egg will cling, then egg, then crumbs again. (The more common period sequence was flour, egg, crumbs.) The dry first coat helps the breading hold in the fat.
- Hot fat means 375F"Hot fat" -- The book gives no temperature; cooks of the period judged the fat by how fast a cube of bread browned. In modern terms, deep fat around 370-375F will cook a crab through in the three minutes given: cooler and the coating drinks grease, hotter and the crumbs darken before the body meat sets.
- Wipe thoroughly, and stand backSoft-shells hold water in the shell cavity and will spit when they hit the fat. Pat them dry inside and out and lower them in shell-side down, with a spatter screen to hand.
- YieldFigure two crabs per person as a main course, one as an appetizer. They do not hold — the shell goes soft and greasy within minutes, which is why the original insists on serving immediately.
Soft-shell crabs are blue crabs (Callinectes sapidus) taken in the brief window after they molt and before the new shell hardens, which on the Chesapeake and along the New England coast falls mainly between late spring and early autumn. Nineteenth-century watermen learned to hold "peelers" in floats and pull them the moment they shed, and the expanding rail and ice trade of the 1880s and 1890s put live soft-shells into Boston and New York restaurants in quantity — which is why a general-purpose American cook book of this era could print the recipe with no explanation of what a soft-shell was. Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like most promotional cook books of the period it surrounded its chocolate and cocoa formulas with a full complement of ordinary household recipes. The pairing with tartare sauce reflects a common French-derived habit of the period, in which fried fish and shellfish often went out with a cold, acidulated mayonnaise — though it was hardly a rule, and drawn butter and lemon were standard accompaniments as well.