Crab Soup
Boil six crabs. Fry the meat with one tablespoon of butter, and one small onion (the onion should be fried quite brown). Add a tablespoon of flour, salt and pepper, cook a little longer, then add one quart of water and one teaspoon of minced parsley. Boil slowly for one hour, add one pint of rich milk, reheat and serve.
A brown-roux crab soup finished with milk, written for a cook who had live crabs on hand and a whole afternoon. Two things need adjusting: what "six crabs" gives you, and the hour of hard boiling.
- Six crabs, in practiceSix live crabs of average size (blue crabs, most likely, given the period and the milk finish) yield somewhere between three-quarters of a cup and a cup and a half of picked meat. Half a pound of picked crabmeat — lump for texture, claw for flavor — stands in for that and saves an hour of picking.
- Do not throw out the shellsThe recipe calls for plain water, but the boiling liquor and the cleaned bodies and shells will make a far better base. Simmer them 20 minutes, strain, and use that quart instead of water. This is the single change that most improves the soup.
- Brown the onion, then the flour"Quite brown" is meant literally for the onion. The recipe asks only that the flour cook "a little longer," though added to browned onion in butter it will take some color of its own; carrying it to the nutty stage gives a fuller-flavored soup, while raw flour tastes pasty.
- The hour of boilingThe original says "boil slowly," but an hour even at a simmer will reduce picked crabmeat to threads. Simmer the liquid, parsley and seasoning for 20 to 30 minutes to marry, and add the crabmeat in the last five minutes. If you are making shell stock separately, the crab need only be warmed through.
- "Rich milk"Milk in 1911 was unhomogenized and considerably fattier at the top of the bottle. Whole milk, or half milk and half light cream, gives the intended body.
- Reheat, do not reboilOnce the milk goes in, keep the pot below a simmer. A crab-and-milk soup can break or catch on the bottom at a boil, and the delicate flavor flattens.
- SeasoningThe original asks only for salt and pepper. A blade of mace, a little cayenne, or a spoonful of dry sherry stirred in at the end are all period-appropriate and all flatter crab.
- YieldA quart of liquid plus a pint of milk makes roughly six cups — four generous first-course servings.
The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the pattern and magazine house best known for dressmaking, one of several publishers of the period who sold housekeeping manuals alongside their patterns and periodicals. This is a straightforward crab soup of a kind made along the Chesapeake and the Jersey and Carolina coasts, where crabs were cheap and plentiful. It belongs to the milk-thickened branch of the family — closer to what a later cook would call a bisque — and is a different dish from the tomato-and-vegetable Maryland crab soup, which carries the same regional claim. The browned onion and flour reflect an older American habit of building even a delicate seafood soup on a colored flour base.