Mock Crabs
4 tablespoons butter ½ cup flour 1½ cups scalded milk 1 can Kornlet 1½ teaspoons salt 1 egg ¾ teaspoon mustard ¼ teaspoon paprika 3 teaspoons Worcestershire Sauce 1 cup buttered cracker crumbs Melt butter, add flour mixed with dry seasonings, and pour on gradually the milk. Add Kornlet, egg slightly beaten, and Worcestershire Sauce. Pour into a buttered baking-dish, cover with crumbs, and bake until crumbs are brown.
A thick white sauce bound with egg, flavored with mustard and Worcestershire, and browned under crumbs — the "crab" is entirely an illusion produced by canned sweet corn pulp. The main obstacle for a modern cook is that the branded ingredient no longer exists.
- KornletA canned product of the early 1900s: young sweet corn scraped from the cob and pureed to a thick, milky pulp, sold in small tins. It has been off the market for generations. The nearest substitute is a 12–15 oz can of cream-style corn, or fresh corn cut and scraped from three or four ears and briefly pulsed.
- The flour quantityThe printed page was checked: the recipe calls for half a cup of flour to four tablespoons of butter and 1½ cups of milk. That proportion gives a very stiff white sauce, thick enough to hold the Kornlet and egg in a spoonable mass rather than a pourable one.
- Mustard and paprikaThe seasoning amounts as printed are unreliable. Treat them as roughly ¾ teaspoon dry mustard and ¼ teaspoon paprika, which suits the volume of sauce; both are there to give the corn a faintly briny, shellfish-adjacent sharpness.
- Scalded milkScalding is called for throughout cookbooks of this period; warm milk blends into a roux more smoothly than cold, and heating milk was also a common household precaution before pasteurisation. With modern milk it is optional.
- Adding the eggTake the sauce off the heat before the beaten egg goes in, or it will scramble in threads through the mixture. Stir a spoonful of hot sauce into the egg first, then return it all to the pan.
- Buttered cracker crumbsAbout a cup of crumbs from soda or common crackers tossed with 2 tablespoons melted butter. Panko works but browns faster and gives a lighter, less dense crust than the original intends.
- Oven and timingThe book assumes you are only browning a mixture already cooked on the stove. A hot oven, 425F, for 15 to 20 minutes will color the crumbs and heat the dish through.
- Yield and servingProbably enough for four as a light entree. The recipe itself calls for a single buttered baking-dish, though creamed mixtures of this kind were often served in scallop shells or individual ramekins, which would complete the crab impression.
Mock dishes were a fixture of American cookery long before this book, and they worked in two directions at once: they stretched a household budget and they let inland kitchens serve something that read as coastal. Kornlet, the canned corn pulp called for here, was a branded convenience product of the era when tinned goods were still novel enough to be named in recipes by trademark rather than description. The choice of corn to stand in for crab is not arbitrary: it has a sweetness and a soft, shredded texture that answers to picked crabmeat, and the mustard, paprika and Worcestershire supply the pungency that the corn cannot. Dishes of this kind also reflect one of the ways crab was eaten around 1900: as a creamed, seasoned, crumb-topped baked mixture in a shell, a form easy enough to counterfeit once you had the sauce right.