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Crab Rabbit
1 tablespoon fat 2 tablespoons flour 2 cups cream 1/8 teaspoon soda 1/2 teaspoon salt Pepper Parsley 1 to 2 cups crabmeat, fresh or canned 2 tablespoons Parmesan cheese Toast Make a white sauce of the fat, flour, cream, soda and seasonings. Add chopped cooked crabmeat. Arrange squares of buttered toast on a hot platter. Pour the crab mixture over them, sprinkle with grated cheese and serve piping hot.
A chafing-dish supper dish from the era when the hostess cooked at the table. The proportions are sound, but the sauce is looser than a modern cook expects and the soda needs explaining.
- The soda is deliberateAn eighth of a teaspoon of baking soda is generally understood to neutralise slight acidity in the crab and in cream that is no longer perfectly fresh, which helps keep the sauce from curdling. Do not increase it; more soda gives a soapy taste.
- "Rabbit" means rarebitNo rabbit is involved. The name marks it as a member of the Welsh rarebit family: a hot savoury sauce poured over toast, here thickened with flour rather than melted cheese.
- Sauce consistencyTwo tablespoons of flour to two cups of liquid is a thin pouring sauce, correct for soaking into toast but too loose if you want it to sit on the plate. For a thicker result use three tablespoons of flour and an equal weight of fat.
- Which cream"Cream" on a household shelf of this period was closer to what we sell as light cream, about 18 to 20 percent fat, than to heavy cream; half-and-half is thinner still. Heavy cream will make the sauce cloying; whole milk works but is more prone to breaking against the crab.
- Crabmeat handlingPick the meat over for cartilage and shell fragments, and fold it in off the heat or over the barest simmer. Crab that is stirred and boiled in a sauce shreds into threads and loses its sweetness in a few minutes.
- The cheeseTwo tablespoons of Parmesan is a seasoning, not a topping. Grate it fine so it melts on contact rather than sitting in gritty flakes.
- ToastCut thick slices, toast them hard and butter them while hot. Thin sandwich bread collapses under a cup of sauce before it reaches the table.
- YieldServes four as a lunch or supper dish, two if it is the whole meal. Parsley, listed but never mentioned again in the method, is chopped and scattered over at the end.