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Baked Soft-Shell Crabs
Season with salt and pepper, dip in melted butter, dust with flour, and bake in a very quick oven for ten minutes. Serve with mustard sauce. See Chapter on Sauces for Fish, Poultry and Game.
A three-line recipe that assumes you already know how to dress a soft-shell crab and how hot a coal range gets. Both need filling in.
- Cleaning comes firstThe book takes for granted that the crabs are dressed. Snip off the face just behind the eyes, lift each point of the top shell and pull out the feathery gills, then turn the crab over and remove the pointed apron. Rinse and pat very dry, or the butter will not cling and the flour will go pasty.
- "A very quick oven"Among the hottest terms in the period's oven vocabulary; modern tables usually put it at roughly 450-500F, though the book itself gives no figures. At the upper end ten minutes should suit medium crabs; large ones may want a little longer. The shell should be crisp and reddened at the edges.
- Buy them alive, or just-killedSoft-shells deteriorate fast. They should be lively and smell of clean seawater. Frozen ones work but release more liquid, so dry them thoroughly and give the pan room.
- Order of operationsSeason, then butter, then flour, exactly as written. Flouring before the butter gives you a gluey coating instead of a crust.
- Use a hot panPreheat a shallow metal pan or heavy skillet in the oven and lay the crabs on it. A cold dish steams the underside, which is the whole difference between this and a good pan-fried soft-shell.
- Mustard sauceThe recipe sends you to the book's chapter of sauces for fish, poultry and game. Period mustard sauces of this kind were typically a white sauce or drawn butter sharpened with dry mustard, sometimes with a little vinegar or lemon. A mustard-spiked hollandaise or a simple mustard butter serves the same purpose.
- YieldThe recipe gives none; two crabs per person as a main course and one as a first course is a reasonable modern allowance. Serve immediately; they lose their crispness quickly.
Soft-shell crabs are blue crabs caught shortly after they have moulted, before the new shell hardens, and the trade in them was built on the Chesapeake and the mid-Atlantic shore, where shedding crabs were held in floats and closely watched. By the time the Butterick book appeared in the early twentieth century, iced rail shipment had carried them well inland, and they were a fashionable spring and summer dish in city hotels and restaurants. Frying is much the commonest treatment in American cookbooks of the period; baking, as here, is the lighter handling, and the mustard sauce supplies sharpness in place of the usual squeeze of lemon.