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Crab Rarebit
Melt one tablespoon of butter, add two tablespoons of flour and cook thoroughly. Add two cups of cream in which has been dissolved a pinch of soda and cook until thick, seasoning with salt, red pepper, and minced parsley. Then add one cup or more of chopped cooked crab meat. When the mixture is heated add two tablespoons of Parmesan cheese and the same quantity of sherry. Arrange squares of buttered toast on a hot platter. Pour the crab mixture over them, sprinkle with grated cheese and serve piping hot.
MEAT RÉCHAUFFÉ WITH CURRANT JELLY SAUCE-Cut cold mutton, lamb or beef into well-shaped pieces, and lay with a little butter in the hot pan. Add a half-pint of stock, a little pepper, a quarter of a teaspoon each of dry mustard and curry-powder, and three large tablespoons of currant jelly. When boiling, put in a glass of sherry. Take the pieces out, pour the boiling gravy over all, and serve instantly.
A chafing-dish supper dish from the era when the chafing dish was a fashionable piece of parlor equipment. Two separate recipes have run together here through a typesetting error: the rarebit ends at "serve piping hot," and the meat réchauffé is a distinct dish.
- The hinge: heat, don't cookThe crab is already cooked and needs only to warm through — a minute or two in the hot sauce. Held longer, or allowed to boil after the cheese and sherry go in, the meat shreds and the sauce breaks.
- That pinch of sodaA period trick to keep cream from curdling when acid or long heat is involved. With fresh cream and gentle heat it is unnecessary, and too much gives a soapy, faintly metallic taste. Leave it out unless you are cooking over an unpredictable flame.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not sweet peppers. A scant 1/8 teaspoon is enough for two cups of sauce.
- Sauce consistencyTwo tablespoons of flour to two cups of cream gives a fairly loose sauce that will slacken further with the sherry. If you want it to sit on toast rather than soak straight through, use three tablespoons of flour, or reduce the cream slightly before adding the crab.
- Crab meatLump or backfin picked crab, and pick it over again for shell and cartilage. Canned pasteurized crab works; drain it well or the sauce thins.
- ParmesanGrate it yourself. Pre-grated shelf-stable cheese contains anti-caking starch that turns the sauce grainy.
- Toast and timingToast the bread while the sauce thickens, not before. The dish is served on a hot platter because it cools fast and stiffens as it does.
- YieldEnough for four as a light supper or six as a first course; the recipe does not say how many squares of toast, so the count depends on how you cut them.
- The second recipe's measuresIn the réchauffé, a half-pint of stock is one cup and a "glass of sherry" of the period is about 2 fluid ounces. It is a way of using up cold roast meat, and the meat should be lifted out before the gravy reduces or it will go stringy.
The chafing dish had a genuine vogue in American middle-class homes from the 1890s into the 1910s, promoted as equipment for informal late suppers, bachelor entertaining and college-room hospitality — cooking at the table, in front of guests, without troubling the kitchen. "Rarebit" comes from Welsh rabbit, the cheese-on-toast dish whose name was genteelly respelled from the late 18th century onward; by 1900 the word had loosened to mean almost any hot savory sauce poured over toast, so a crab rarebit needs no cheese-and-ale pedigree beyond the toast and the melted Parmesan. Crab was a plausible chafing-dish ingredient by this date because picked crab meat was being shipped in ice-packed containers from the Chesapeake and the Gulf, which put it within reach of cooks well inland. The neighboring réchauffé — French for a reheated dish — shows the other half of the chafing dish's appeal: it made leftovers presentable.