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Devilled Crabs
1 doz. crabs bread crumbs 1/2 cup shortening 1/2 teaspoon mustard 1 teaspoon salt few grains cayenne Remove meat from shells, carefully discarding bones. Put meat in bowl and mix with it equal quantity fine bread crumbs. Work shortening to light cream, add seasonings and stir, little at time, mix crabs and crumbs. Fill crab shells with mixture, sprinkle buttered bread crumbs over top, brown quickly in hot oven. Serves six.
A plain deviled crab of the sort that turns up in almost every American seafood chapter from the 1880s onward. The recipe assumes you begin with crabs already boiled and cooled, and that you have kept the top shells to serve in.
- Start with cooked crabsThe instruction to "remove meat from shells" presumes the crabs have already been boiled or steamed and drained. A dozen crabs of the usual market size will give roughly a cup to a cup and a half of picked meat, depending on size and species, so plan on about the same volume of fine dry crumbs.
- Shortening means butter hereShortening -- In this period "shortening" covers butter, lard or the newer vegetable compounds; note that the recipe specifies buttered crumbs for the top but only "shortening" for the body, so butter was not necessarily intended. Butter, worked soft and creamed as directed, binds the mixture and carries the mustard and cayenne well.
- A hot oven"Brown quickly in hot oven" corresponds to roughly 400-450F. The filling is already cooked, so you are only heating through and colouring the crumb top -- 10 to 15 minutes, or a few minutes under the broiler.
- Discarding bonesCrabs have no bones. What is meant is the fibrous gill tissue and any shell fragments, which must be picked out carefully.
- The seasoning is restrainedHalf a teaspoon of dry mustard and a few grains of cayenne across a dozen crabs is mild by current taste. Season the creamed butter, taste it before it goes into the crab, and adjust there rather than after mixing.
- Shells for bakingThe hard top shells are what normally serve as the dishes. Scrub and boil them before filling. If you have not kept them, small ramekins or scallop shells work; the recipe says it serves six.
Deviled crab belongs to the long nineteenth-century vogue for "devilling" -- dressing cooked meat or fish with mustard and cayenne and browning it, a treatment recorded in English cookery from around the turn of the nineteenth century and applied indiscriminately to kidneys, bones, ham and shellfish. Serving the mixture back in the crab's own shell was both economical and decorative, and the dish became a fixture along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, where blue crabs were cheap and plentiful; Baltimore, Charleston and Tampa each developed local versions, the last with a bread-heavy filling that still turns up as a fried croquette.