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Dressing Shell Fish: Boil
CRABS. 200. To BOIL. - Proceed as for lobsters. 201. TO DRESS HOT. - After picking the meat out of the shell, season it with pepper and salt. Then wash the shell clean, and after making with pepper and salt. Then wash the shell clean, and after making the white meat hot in a saucepan, lay it in the shell with the soft part at top; strew crumbs of bread and brown it over. 202. TO DRESS COLD.-Empty the shells, and mix the flesh with oil, vinegar, salt, and a little white pepper and cayenne; then put the mixture into the large shell, and serve; very little oil is necessary, and by some people it is altogether disliked.
Three short entries covering a boiled crab and the two standard ways of returning the meat to its shell, hot or cold. The instructions assume you already know how to clean a crab, which is the part worth spelling out.
- Clean the crab properly firstOnce the body is opened, discard the stomach sac behind the mouth and the grey, feathery gills along the sides of the body (the "dead man's fingers"). Neither is poisonous, but both are unpleasant in texture and taste, and the recipe says nothing about them.
- "Proceed as for lobsters"The method is not repeated here, so you are sent back to the lobster entry. Boiling in well-salted water, roughly 1 oz salt to a pint, or in sea water, is the usual approach. Reckon about 15 minutes for a 1 lb crab and 5 minutes more per additional pound; a 3 lb crab needs around 25 minutes. Overcooked crab meat turns dry and shreds.
- White meat and brown meatThe "soft part" is the brown meat from inside the carapace, and it is the strongly flavoured half of the dish. Keep it separate from the white claw and leg meat while picking, as the recipes rely on the contrast.
- Browning the hot crab"brown it over" would in this period have been done with a salamander, an iron plate heated in the fire and held above the dish, or before the fire itself. Use an overhead grill at its highest setting for 2 to 3 minutes, close under the element, or a blowtorch. The meat is already cooked, so you are only colouring the crumbs.
- Washing the shellScrub the carapace inside and out, then dry it. If you intend to serve in it repeatedly, trim the ragged underside edge with kitchen scissors along the natural dark line so it sits flat on the plate.
- The cold dressingThis is dressed crab with a plain vinaigrette rather than the mayonnaise now usual. The note that the oil "is altogether disliked" by some is worth taking seriously: start with a teaspoon of oil to a tablespoon of vinegar and taste, since crab brown meat is already rich.
- YieldA 2 lb crab gives roughly 8 oz of picked meat, enough for two as a first course or one as a light main. Serve the cold version with brown bread and butter and a wedge of lemon.
- FreshnessBuy the crab live or cooked the same day, and pick the meat within a few hours of boiling. Picked crab meat is highly perishable; refrigerate at once and eat within 24 hours.
Dressed crab served in its own shell is a long-standing form of British shellfish cookery, and both versions here, hot with browned crumbs and cold with oil and vinegar, appear in English cookery books of the period. The shell served as the dish. Crabs were landed in quantity on the coasts of Devon, Cornwall, Norfolk and Scotland, and were generally a good deal cheaper than lobster. The hot version, essentially a gratin, belongs to the same family as scalloped oysters and other crumb-topped shellfish dishes. The aside that some people dislike the oil reads as a genuine observation: olive oil was an imported ingredient and not universally liked in British kitchens.