Deviled Crabs
1 hard-boiled egg 2 tablespoons butter Grated nutmeg 1 raw egg 1/3 cup cream Salt and cayenne 1/4 teaspoon sweet marjoram Cracker dust Put the crabs into hot water; add salt and boil for thirty minutes. Or, buy crab meat already picked and ask the dealer for six shells. Cut the meat into small pieces; add the hardboiled egg, cream, butter and seasoning and cook for a few minutes over a hot fire, thickening the mixture with cracker dust. Fill the shells; dip them in the raw egg, beaten; then in cracker crumbs; place in a hot oven or drop into boiling fat and fry until brown.
A compact recipe that assumes you know how many crabs you are working with — the ingredient list never says. Six shells are called for, so plan on roughly a pound of picked crab meat, or six to eight hard-shell blue crabs.
- Missing quantityThe list gives eggs, cream and seasoning but no crab. Six filled shells take roughly 1 lb of picked meat; if you boil your own, that is on the order of eight to a dozen blue crabs, depending on size.
- Thirty minutes is too longBlue crabs are done in 12-15 minutes in salted boiling water, and larger crabs in about 20. A half hour makes the meat stringy and washes out flavour.
- Cracker dustFinely crushed plain soda or water crackers, sifted to a powder — it thickens the mixture the way a panade would. The "cracker crumbs" for the outside coating are the coarser version of the same thing. Unsalted saltines or panko both work.
- The shellsOnly the top carapace is used, scrubbed and boiled. Fishmongers rarely stock them now; ceramic crab-shell dishes or 6 oz ramekins do the same job, though they cannot be dropped into fat.
- Oven or fryerThe book does not define what it means by a 'hot oven'; the phrase is generally taken to mean something in the region of 400-450F. For frying, 375F fat gives a brown crust in two to three minutes; the filling is already cooked, so you are only setting the coating.
- Sweet marjoramStill sold, but easily confused with oregano, which is far more assertive. Use the marjoram, and use it dried at the quarter-teaspoon called for — the point is a background note under the nutmeg and cayenne.
- Cooking the filling"A few minutes over a hot fire" means just long enough to bind the cream, butter and cracker dust into a thick, scoopable mass. Take it off while it still slumps; it firms as it cools and will be dry if reduced too far.
- YieldSix shells, one to a person as a first course or two as a light main.
Deviling — the trick of dosing something with cayenne, mustard or both and browning it — is a British kitchen habit generally traced to the very end of the eighteenth century, and American cooks applied it enthusiastically to crab. The dish is most closely associated with the Chesapeake and the South Atlantic coast, where blue crabs were cheap and the picked-out top shells made a ready serving vessel; Charleston and Baltimore versions of the same idea appear across late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookbooks with only small differences in seasoning. Mrs. Fryer's book, published in Philadelphia in the 1910s in loose-leaf form, sits squarely in that Mid-Atlantic tradition. The line about buying meat already picked and asking the dealer for six shells is worth noting: the recipe treats boiling your own crabs as the alternative rather than the default.