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Salt (Teaspoon finely chopped onion)
2 tablespoons butter. 2/3 tablespoon curry powder. 1 cup chicken stock. 1 cup crab meat. 1 teaspoon finely chopped onion 3 tablespoons flour Cook butter with onion three minutes, add flour mixed with curry powder and chicken stock. When boiling-point is reached add crab meat and season with salt.
This entry has come down to us mangled: the title has swallowed one ingredient line and the ingredient column has lost most of the rest. What survives is a curried crab meat in a thin white sauce, and the method is complete enough to follow if you supply the missing quantities.
- What is missingThe method calls for butter, curry powder and chicken stock, none of which appear in the surviving ingredient list, and the crab quantity is gone as well. Anything given here as a proportion is inference, not the book's own measure.
- Working proportionsThree tablespoons flour is the anchor. A sauce of moderate body would take roughly three tablespoons butter and about 1 1/2 cups stock, with 1 to 2 teaspoons curry powder and something like 2 cups (about 1 lb) picked crab meat. These are our figures, not the book's.
- The hingeCook the flour and curry powder in the butter until the raw floury smell goes, then add the stock and bring it to the boil before the crab goes in. Crab added to an unboiled sauce leaves you with a pasty, floury coating.
- Curry powder then and nowCommercial curry powder of the period was generally mild and turmeric-forward, and modern blends vary widely in heat. Start at the low end and taste; the flour will mute it slightly.
- Crab meatFresh picked lump or backfin needs only to be warmed through, two or three minutes, and should be folded in rather than stirred so the lumps survive. Canned crab should be drained and pressed lightly; if it tastes tinny, a squeeze of lemon at the end fixes it.
- SaltSeason at the very end. Both stock and canned crab carry salt of their own, and the sauce concentrates as it stands.
- ServingA dish of this kind was served as a small hot course: in ramekins, in a puff-paste shell, or on toast. At the proportions suggested above it would fill about six ramekins.
Curried crab belongs to the small, formal category period cookbooks called entrees: not a main dish but a hot made dish served between heavier courses, usually in individual portions and usually built on a flour-thickened sauce. Books of this kind run dozens of variations on a single template -- a butter-and-flour roux loosened with stock or milk, finished with whatever shellfish, sweetbread or chicken was to hand -- which may be why a fragment like this one is still legible: the reader was expected to know the proportions and to read only for the variation. Curry powder had been sold ready-blended on Anglo-American grocery shelves since the early nineteenth century, and was treated as a single seasoning rather than a mixture to be built from parts. The garbling here, with an ingredient line swallowed into the title, looks like a transcription artifact.