Oyster Crabs
Melt two tablespoons butter; add one tablespoon lemon juice, one fourth teaspoon salt, few grains cayenne, two tablespoons chopped pimolas. Add one cup crabs and let simmer ten minutes. Serve in croustades.
A late-Victorian and Edwardian delicacy that hinges on two things: sourcing the crabs, and not overcooking them. Everything else is a butter sauce.
- Oyster crabsThese are Pinnotheres ostreum, the pea-sized commensal crabs that live inside living oysters, eaten whole, shell and all. They are almost never sold now — shuckers discard them — so a cup of them means either a standing arrangement with an oyster house or a substitute such as tiny peeled shrimp or crawfish tails, which behave similarly in the pan.
- The ten minutesCrabs the size of a pea need very little cooking, and ten minutes of simmering will likely toughen them and cook off the sweetness. Warming them through in the seasoned butter is the safer reading, though the original clearly intends a longer simmer.
- PimolasA trade name of the period for green olives stuffed with pimiento, sold whole in jars. Ordinary pimiento-stuffed Spanish olives are the direct equivalent; two tablespoons chopped is roughly six to eight olives, and they should go in near the end so they stay firm.
- CroustadesIn this period a croustade is usually a case cut from a stale loaf, hollowed, and fried or baked crisp in fat, then filled at the last moment; pastry cases were also called by the name. Puff-pastry shells or toast cups work, but fill them as they go to the table or the butter will soften the base.
- Cayenne"Few grains" is a standard measure in cookbooks of this period rather than vagueness — a pinch well under an eighth of a teaspoon. The dish is meant to taste of butter and crab, with the pepper only sharpening the edge.
- YieldOne cup of crabs with this much butter fills three or four small croustades — a first course or a light entrée in the period sense, not a main dish.
Oyster crabs were one of the small luxuries of American East Coast dining between roughly the 1870s and the 1920s, when Chesapeake and Long Island Sound oysters were shucked in enormous volume and the crabs inside them could be collected by the pint. They appear on Delmonico's menus and in cookbooks of the era, usually fried in deep fat or, as here, simmered briefly in butter and served in a bread case. The recipe's presence in a chocolate manufacturer's cookbook is a reminder of what those volumes actually were: Lowney's published a full general cookery book, with the confectionery chapters as the commercial point, so the entrée section reflects standard genteel American cooking of the day. The dish's disappearance is usually attributed to the collapse of the wild oyster fisheries and the rise of mechanized shucking, which left no one to pick the crabs out.