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Fried Oyster Crabs
Wash and drain crabs. Roll in flour, and shake in a sieve to remove superfluous flour. Fry in a basket in deep fat, having fat same temperature as for cooked mixtures. Drain, and place on a napkin, and garnish with parsley and slices of lemon. Serve with Sauce Tyrolienne.
Bouchées of Oyster Crabs Pick over oyster crabs, dip in flour, cold milk, and crumbs, fry in deep fat, and drain on brown paper. Fill bouchée cases with crabs.
A two-minute fry that depends entirely on fat temperature and on finding the crabs at all. Everything else here is garnish.
- "Same temperature as for cooked mixtures"Fannie Farmer's fat chart distinguishes cooked mixtures (croquettes, anything already cooked through, which need only a fast crust) from raw ones. That is roughly 380-390F, tested in her book by a bread cube browning in about 40 seconds. Oyster crabs are cooked through in well under a minute at that heat; pull them the moment they are pale gold.
- Oyster crabsPinnotheres ostreum, the soft, thumbnail-sized commensal crab that lives inside a living oyster. They were a byproduct of commercial shucking and are now almost never sold; if you want them you generally have to save them from oysters you open yourself, which means dozens of oysters for a portion. Nothing else eats quite the same, though tiny whole shrimp fried the same way come closest.
- They are eaten wholeNo cleaning, picking or shelling. The shell is soft enough to eat, which is the whole appeal, so "wash and drain" means a rinse and a thorough blotting dry before flouring.
- Shake off the flourThe sieve step is not fussiness. Loose flour on something this small burns almost at once at frying heat and clouds the fat, which matters if you are frying in batches.
- Frying basketA wire basket keeps a mass of very small pieces together and lets you lift them all at one instant. A spider or fine skimmer does the same job; a slotted spoon is too slow.
- Napkin and brown paperBoth are period draining surfaces. Use paper towel on a rack, and do not stack the crabs while they steam.
- Sauce TyrolienneGenerally a mayonnaise-type sauce flavoured with tomato, sometimes with herbs. Any tomato-tinted aioli or a tarragon remoulade fills the same role.
- BouchéesSmall puff pastry cases, roughly one to two inches across, baked blind and hollowed. Frozen puff pastry vol-au-vent shells are the direct modern equivalent. Fill them at the last second or the pastry goes soft.
- YieldThe original gives no quantity. Figure an ounce or two of crabs per person as an entree course, or two to three filled bouchees each.
Oyster crabs were a genuine luxury of the American Atlantic coast in the late nineteenth century, and they existed as a dish only because the oyster trade was enormous. Shucked oysters yielded these tiny pale crabs living inside the shells, and shucking houses in cities such as New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore are said to have sold them separately to hotels and restaurants, where they were fried whole or turned into a cream stew. Their appearance alongside bouchees and a French sauce places them in the hotel-influenced service of the 1890s: a small hot dish between courses, garnished with parsley and lemon, meant to be conspicuously expensive for its size. As the oyster trade changed and wild oyster beds in Chesapeake Bay and around New York declined, the byproduct went with them, and a dish once common on printed menus became something few cooks have now seen.