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Fried Soft-Shells
Dip prepared crabs in lightly salted corn meal or flour and fry in butter on both sides. They should be quickly and lightly browned and crisp, but not burned.
Soft-shells are especially toothsome when handed out on soft buttered toast, with tartare sauce. All of the little dears are eaten, of course, right down to the toenails. And that is as it should be, now that soft-shelled crabs cost almost as much as terrapin. Fishermen, both professional and amateur, fancy butterfried soft-shells as a topping for their swordfish steaks, which are likewise butter-fried.
A camp-style treatment of soft-shell crabs that assumes you already know how to clean them. The whole technique rests on high heat and a very short time in the pan.
- "Prepared" crabsThe original skips the cleaning: snip off the face just behind the eyes, lift each side of the shell and pull out the feathery gills, then remove the apron on the underside. Rinse and pat thoroughly dry, or the coating will slide off.
- TimingTwo to three minutes per side over medium-high heat is enough for a hotel-size crab. Longer and the shell toughens while the body goes watery.
- Butter alone will burnCornmeal browns fast and whole butter smokes at around 300F. Use clarified butter, or half butter and half neutral oil, to get colour without scorching the milk solids.
- CoatingFine or medium cornmeal gives the crisper crust; flour gives a thinner, more delicate one. Coat immediately before frying, not in advance, since the crabs weep and turn the dredge to paste.
- SpatterSoft-shells hold a good deal of moisture and will pop in hot fat. A splatter screen and dry crabs both help; keep the pan uncrowded so the heat does not drop.
- Sizes and yieldCrabs are sold by graded size; "hotel" runs roughly 4 to 4.5 inches point to point, with smaller "mediums" below it and "prime," "jumbo" and "whale" above. Figure two to three per person as a main course, one on toast as a starter.
- Tartare sauceMade here from scratch: mayonnaise with chopped capers, cornichon or pickle, shallot and parsley, sharpened with lemon. A commercial jar works but is often sweeter.
- On the swordfishSwordfish steak is lean and dries out quickly; cook to just done, about 125-130F internally, if you want to follow the fishermen's plate.
Soft-shell crabs are ordinary blue crabs caught in the few hours after they shed their old shell and before the new one hardens, which is why the entire animal is edible and why the season is short and unpredictable, running roughly from late spring through summer on the American Atlantic coast. The comparison to terrapin dates the passage: diamondback terrapin was the great luxury food of nineteenth-century American dining, and by the early twentieth century it had been fished so heavily that a bowl of terrapin stew was a byword for expense. That the writer can put soft-shells in the same price bracket shows how far the crab had travelled from a fisherman's incidental catch to a restaurant delicacy. The pairing with buttered toast is the classic service, the bread catching the butter and juices that would otherwise be lost.