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Nutmeg (Yolks two eggs tablespoon)
1 cup oyster crabs 1 cup mushroom caps 1/3 cup Sherry wine 1/4 cup butter 1 tablespoon flour 3/4 cup cream Yolks two eggs 1 tablespoon brandy Peel mushroom caps and break in pieces. Add oyster crabs and wine, cover, and let stand one hour. Melt butter, add first mixture, and cook eight minutes. Add flour, and cook two minutes. Season with salt, cayenne, and nutmeg; then add heavy cream. Just before serving add egg yolks, slightly beaten, and brandy.
A creamed entrée of oyster crabs and mushrooms, thickened with flour and finished with yolks and brandy. Only part of the ingredient list survives on this page, so quantities for the mushrooms, crabs, wine, butter, flour and cream have to be judged by eye.
- The hinge: the yolk liaisonOnce the two beaten yolks and the brandy go in, the pan must not return to a simmer or the sauce will curdle into scrambled egg in cream. Pull it from the heat, stir the yolks in, and let residual warmth do the thickening.
- Oyster crabsThese are the pea-sized commensal crabs that live inside living oysters, eaten whole, shell and all. They are hard to come by today; a fishmonger who shucks his own oysters is the likeliest source. Small peeled shrimp or crawfish tails will stand in, though they are a different thing entirely.
- "Peel mushroom caps"Routine instruction in cookbooks of this period. Cultivated white or cremini mushrooms need only wiping; skip the peeling and simply tear the caps.
- Missing quantitiesThe surviving text gives amounts only for the yolks and the brandy. Read as a sauce, it wants roughly equal butter and flour (about 2 tablespoons each) to a cup of heavy cream, with a few tablespoons of wine for the hour-long maceration.
- The wineUnspecified here; a dry white or sherry rather than anything sweet suits the dish. The hour of standing is a marinade, not a cure, and it can be done in the refrigerator.
- Cooking timesEight minutes is generous for tiny crabs and cut mushrooms; the point is to drive off liquid from the mushrooms rather than to cook the shellfish through. The two minutes after the flour goes in is the minimum needed to lose the raw-flour taste.
- Nutmeg and cayenneGrate the nutmeg fresh at the pan; pre-ground loses most of its point in cream sauces. Cayenne here is a background heat, a scant pinch, not a seasoning you should taste as pepper.
- ServingWith the quantities missing there is no way to fix a yield; serve it in small ramekins, or spooned over toast points or into pastry shells as a first course.
Oyster crabs were prized in American cookery in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when East Coast oysters were shucked in quantity and the small crabs found inside them could be collected. They appear in restaurant menus of the period fried whole, in cream, and in chafing-dish preparations of this kind. The dish has the shape of an entree course: small, rich, finished at the last moment with yolks and spirits. As the oyster fishery declined the crabs largely disappeared from cooking, and they survive now mostly as a footnote in old cookbooks.