Crab, to Dress
INGREDIENTS for sufficient for 3 persons.-1 medium-sized crab, 2 tablespoonfuls of vinegar, 1 ditto of oil; salt, white pepper and cayenne, to taste.
AVERAGE COST, 1s. 3d.
Empty the shells, and thoroughly mix the meat with the above ingredients, and put it in the large shell. Garnish with slices of cut lemon and parsley. The quantity of oil may be increased when it is much liked.
SEASONABLE all the year; but not so good in May, June and July.
Cracker Pudding. (American Recipe.) - INGREDIENTS for medium-sized pudding.-1 cupful of cracker-crumbs, 1/4 lb. of beef suet, 3 eggs, 2 tablespoonfuls of sugar, 3 cups of milk, 1/2 teaspoonful of salt. AVERAGE COST, 10d.
Chop the suet very fine and beat the eggs, and while doing this let the crackercrumbs be soaking in the milk. Mix the eggs and sugar with the cracker, then the suet and salt, and work to a smooth paste.
Bake in a buttered pie-dish for 00/4 hour.
Serve with fruit sauce or stewed fruit.
TIME. hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Two unrelated entries run together here: a cold dressed crab and an American baked cracker custard. Both assume knowledge the text does not supply — chiefly that the crab arrives already boiled.
- The crab is already cookedBeeton's crab entries assume a whole crab boiled and cooled. "Empty the shells" means picking a cooked crab, not dressing a live one. Buy a cooked crab, or boil it yourself first, and keep it chilled until you dress it.
- What to discardWhen you open the body, remove and throw away the feathery grey gills (the "dead man's fingers"), the stomach sac behind the mouth, and any green-black membrane. Keep the pale body meat and claw meat separate from the soft brown meat in the shell; they have very different textures.
- Dressing quantitiesTwo tablespoons of vinegar to one of oil is sharp by modern taste, and the note that the oil may be increased is the useful part. A medium crab yields roughly 6-8 oz of picked meat; start with a tablespoon each of oil and vinegar and season upward. Cayenne with brown crab meat is still standard practice.
- The shell as a dishScrub the emptied top shell, snap away the thin frilled edge to the natural line, and scald it before filling. Serve cold, dressed within a few hours of picking, with brown bread and butter. Enough for three as a starter.
- "Not so good in May, June and July"British brown crabs are in poorer condition in late spring and early summer, when the meat tends to be watery. The seasonal note still holds.
- Cracker-crumbsPlain unsweetened soda crackers or water biscuits, crushed fine — not sweet graham crackers or seasoned crackers. One cupful of crumbs to three cups of milk gives a loose custard set by the crumbs and eggs.
- SuetQuarter of a pound of beef suet chopped very fine; shredded packet suet works and needs no chopping. Vegetable suet gives a lighter, less savoury result.
- The garbled time and the oven"00/4 hour" is a printing failure, probably three-quarters of an hour. The text gives no oven heat; bake at around 350F for 45 minutes to an hour, until the centre is just set and a knife comes out clean. Standing the pie-dish in a tin of hot water keeps the edges from curdling before the middle sets.
- Costs1s. 3d. and 10d. are pre-decimal shillings and pence and mean nothing at today's prices; Beeton printed them so a housekeeper could check the accounts.
Dressed crab is one of the plainest things in the Victorian repertoire: no cream, no breadcrumbs, no baking, just picked meat sharpened with oil and vinegar and returned to its own shell — a presentation that survives essentially unchanged in British seaside cafés and fishmongers today. Beeton's seasonal warning reflects a fishery that relied largely on inshore pots and on crabs eaten within a day or two of landing, at a time when ice and rail freight were beginning to soften the seasons. The cracker pudding beside it is labelled "American Recipe", one of many such borrowings that accumulated in the later, much-expanded editions of Beeton's work long after Isabella Beeton's death in 1865; cracker or soda-biscuit puddings were a standard American way of stretching milk and eggs when stale bread was not to hand, and belong to the same thrifty family as bread pudding and Indian pudding.