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Crabs with Rice
15 small crabs
2 small carrots
1 cup rice
1 tablespoon butter
2 or 3 small onions
Salt and pepper
Clean the crabs. Cut off and crush the legs, and cook in boiling salted water for about an hour. Strain the juice and pour it over the rice. Let stand for about half an hour and then cook until rice is tender. Cook the chopped onion and carrots in the butter until slightly browned and then add the crab-meat. Season with salt and pepper, add the rice and cook together for several minutes. Serve hot.
This is an old provincial recipe and has a particularly delicious taste that makes it a favorite.
A coastal French rice dish built on crab broth rather than on crab meat, which is used sparingly at the end. The recipe assumes you know that the shells and legs are flavouring, not food.
- What "small crabs" meansProbably shore or small swimming crabs (étrilles) of the sort sold cheaply for broth and picked over for scraps of meat. Fifteen would come to roughly 2 to 3 lb of whole crab; substitute small blue crabs, or one large picked crab for the meat plus about 2 lb of shells and legs for the stock.
- Two cooking stages, not oneThe hour of boiling applies to the crushed legs and shells, which need that long to give up flavour. Do not leave the body meat in the pot for an hour — steam or boil whole crabs 8 to 10 minutes, pick the meat, then return the shells and legs to the water for the long simmer.
- Crush the shells properlyThis is the hinge. Broken shell surfaces are what make the broth taste of crab; whole legs dropped in a pot give thin water. Use a rolling pin or the flat of a heavy knife until the pieces are in fragments.
- The soakHalf an hour standing in the strained broth softens the grain before it cooks and shortens the cooking. About 2 cups of broth to 1 cup of rice, cooked covered until the liquid is absorbed, suits the method.
- Butter and vegetablesOne tablespoon of butter for two carrots and three onions is scant by modern habit; two or three tablespoons browns them better and does no harm. Dice the vegetables fine so they cook through in the pan.
- Don't cook the meat twiceAs written the crab goes into the pan before the rice and takes the full "several minutes". Fold the picked crab in at the very end and warm it through only; longer and it toughens and loses its sweetness.
- SaltThe crabs are boiled in salted water and that salt concentrates in the broth the rice absorbs. Season at the end, after tasting, not before.
- YieldNo yield is given; 1 cup of rice with the crab makes about three to four servings, more as a first course.
This is often said to belong to the Atlantic and Channel coasts of France, where small swimming crabs too fiddly to be worth picking were sold cheaply and used mainly for their broth — the same thrift that produces soupe de crabes and the shellfish bisques. The method here, soaking and then cooking rice in shellfish liquor, is the everyday cousin of a restaurant risotto or a Provençal riz aux fruits de mer, and the note that it is "an old provincial recipe" is the book flagging it as rustic rather than Parisian. The Butterick Publishing Company was a pattern and magazine house whose household compilations gathered such dishes for American readers, at a period when French cookery carried real prestige in the United States and a chapter of it was expected in any general domestic manual.