Home › Shellfish › Creamed Crabs
Creamed Crabs
Make a thin white sauce with 1 tablespoon flour, 1 tablespoon butter, and 2 cups milk; stir and cook 5 minutes; stir in 2 beaten egg yolks and remove from heat. Season to taste with salt and cayenne, add 1 teaspoon minced parsley, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, 1 tablespoon sherry, and 11/2 cups minced cooked crab meat. Reheat and serve on toast.
A simple creamed shellfish dish that depends entirely on gentle heat: the sauce carries raw egg yolk, and once the crab goes in the pan should never come near a boil.
- The hinge: reheat, do not boilAfter the yolks go in the sauce is egg-thickened. Bring it back over low heat, stirring, until it steams, and do not let it reach a boil; boiling will curdle the yolks into grainy specks.
- Temper the yolksThe recipe stirs the beaten yolks straight into the hot sauce and takes the pan off the heat, which works if you stir briskly. Whisking a ladle of the hot sauce into the yolks first and returning the mixture to the pan is safer insurance against the yolks setting on contact.
- Cooking the rouxOne tablespoon each of flour and butter to two cups milk is a very thin sauce by design. Cook the flour and butter together a minute before adding milk so the sauce does not taste pasty, then the five minutes of simmering will thicken it.
- Crab quantityThe amount of crab meat in the text has lost its spacing; read it as 1 1/2 cups, which is roughly 8 ounces of picked meat. Lump or backfin is worth the money here — fold it in rather than mincing it to a paste.
- Cayenne and sherryCayenne means a few grains, not a measured pinch; it should sharpen the crab, not announce itself. Use a dry sherry, not cooking sherry, which is salted.
- Yield and servingServes four on toast as a light supper, or six as a first course. Toast points, split biscuits or puff pastry shells all suit it; the sauce is thin enough that the bread needs to be crisp or it collapses.
- Outdoor cooking noteOver a fire or camp stove, work off direct flame — a heavy pan set at the edge of the coals, or a pan of water beneath — since direct heat will curdle an egg-thickened sauce.