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Broiled Soft-Shell Crabs
Clean eight crabs and season them with salt and pepper. In a deep plate melt one-half cup of butter and add two tablespoons of lemon juice and one-fourth of a teaspoon of cayenne. Roll the crabs first in this mixture, then in dry flour. Place them in a double broiler and broil over hot coals eight minutes.
A three-ingredient baste and eight minutes over fire — the whole recipe depends on the crabs being fresh and the heat being high. Two terms need translating before you start.
- "Clean" the crabsSoft-shells must be bought alive or cleaned-and-frozen; a dead uncleaned crab spoils fast. Cleaning means snipping off the face just behind the eyes, lifting each side of the top shell to pull out the feathery gills, and cutting away the apron on the underside. Pat very dry or the flour will not stick.
- "Double broiler"Not a double boiler. This is a hinged wire grill basket that clamps the food between two grids so it can be flipped whole — indispensable for something as fragile as a soft-shell. A fish basket or two cooling racks clipped together does the same job.
- "Over hot coals"A direct, high fire: coals ashed over and glowing, with the grate set close above them. Under a modern overhead broiler, preheat fully and set the rack four to five inches from the element.
- Eight minutes, splitEight minutes -- That is the total time given; in a hinged broiler it is usually read as about four minutes a side. The crabs are done when the shells have turned from grey-green to orange-red and the flour coating is browned. Past that they dry out and the legs go brittle.
- The butter dipHalf a cup of melted butter for eight crabs is generous by design — it is a dip, not a sauce, and the excess stays in the plate. A quarter teaspoon of cayenne across eight crabs is a warm background note rather than real heat.
- Flour after fatRolling in butter and then dry flour gives a thin paste that crisps over the coals. It will scorch if the fire is too fierce; you want browning, not blackening. Season the flour lightly as well, since the salt and pepper were applied to wet crabs.
- Spatter and flare-upsButter-coated crabs drip. Expect flames if the fire is very hot; move the basket to a cooler part of the grate rather than trying to smother them.
- YieldEight crabs serves four as a main course, eight as a first course. Serve immediately with lemon, or on toast to catch the butter.
Soft-shell crabs are blue crabs (Callinectes sapidus) taken in the few hours after they have shed their old carapace and before the new one hardens, which makes the entire animal edible. The trade grew up around the Chesapeake Bay, where watermen learned to hold molting "peelers" in floats and pull them at exactly the right moment, and shipping them onward to city markets is why a general-purpose household book like this one could assume its readers had access to them at all. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns, issued its cook book in 1911 for a middle-class audience. The season still runs, as it always did, from late spring through summer.