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Devilled Crabs
Melt one tablespoonful of butter, add one tablespoonful of flour, and, when blended, one cup of milk. Add the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs rubbed through a sieve, and season to taste with salt, paprica, a teaspoonful of lemon juice and wine; cayenne, mustard and tobasco sauce are approved by some. Add one cup of crab meat and one-fourth a cup of canned mushrooms cut in quarters. Serve on toast.
A chafing-dish sauce built on a small white roux, thickened further with sieved hard-boiled yolk. The whole thing takes about ten minutes once the crab is picked over.
- Cook the flour before the milkLet the butter and flour bubble together for a minute before adding the milk, or the sauce tastes pasty. Add the milk in stages and whisk smooth each time.
- The sieved yolks are the pointTwo hard-boiled yolks pushed through a fine sieve give the sauce its body and its slightly grainy richness. Add them off the heat and stir them in thoroughly; dropped in whole or half-crushed they will stay lumpy.
- Wine, unmeasuredWine, quantity unclear -- The original reads "a teaspoonful of lemon juice and wine," so the teaspoonful may govern both; if it does not, no quantity is given for the wine. A tablespoon of dry sherry or Madeira is a defensible reading; more than two will thin the sauce and dominate the crab.
- Crab last, and brieflyAdd the crab meat at the end and heat it through only, a minute or two. Crab is already cooked, and simmering shreds lump meat into cotton.
- Paprica, tobascoPeriod spellings of paprika and Tabasco. "Devilled" here describes a sharply seasoned sauce rather than a mixture baked in a shell; note that the cayenne, mustard and hot sauce are offered as options only, "approved by some."
- Canned mushroomsA common commercial pantry item by the turn of the century and still fine, drained and rinsed. Quartered fresh button mushrooms sauteed in a little butter first are better; raw ones will weep water into the sauce.
- YieldAbout two generous servings on toast, or four as a first course. Use bread firm enough not to collapse under the sauce.
Chafing-dish cookery had a real vogue in American cities around the turn of the twentieth century, when a spirit lamp and a metal pan let people cook at the table in apartments and clubrooms without a kitchen staff. This is a chafing-dish deviled crab rather than the older baked kind, which was mixed with crumbs, returned to the shell and browned; the sauce version trades the shell for toast and gains speed. "Devil" as a culinary term for aggressive seasoning with mustard and cayenne is generally traced to English usage of the late eighteenth century and had crossed to American cooking well before this book. The reliance on canned mushrooms and picked crab meat marks the period too: both were newly dependable commercial products, and cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s use them freely.