Creamed Crabs
To one cup of white sauce add the meat from one dozen crabs and season with salt, pepper and cayenne. Serve very hot in individual cases, pâté shells, or on toast. CRABS À LA NEWBERG-Use recipe for Lobster à la Newberg. See Chapter on Chafing-dish Recipes.
Two lines of instruction that assume you already know how to make white sauce and how to pick a crab. The proportions are the only thing worth pinning down.
- White sauceA medium béchamel: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon. The book expects it already made and hot from another page; salt it before the crab goes in, since crab meat should not be stirred about while you taste.
- A dozen crabsPicked hard-shell crabs, most likely blue crabs given the book's origin. Yields vary with size, but a dozen medium crabs give somewhere around 1 to 1½ cups of meat. Half a pound or so of refrigerated lump or backfin crabmeat is the practical substitute, picked over for cartilage and shell fragments.
- RatioOne cup of sauce to that much crab gives a very thick mixture, barely bound rather than soupy. That is intentional for filling shells; if you are spooning it over toast, thin it with a few tablespoons of milk or cream.
- Heat it gentlyThe crab is already cooked. Fold it into the hot sauce and warm it through for a minute or two, no more. Held at a simmer, picked crab shreds and turns stringy and watery.
- CayenneThe recipe gives no quantity. Start at a pinch for the full cup and add more; the point is a warm finish behind the sweetness of the crab, not visible heat.
- "Individual cases" and pâté shells"Individual cases" and pâté shells -- cases are small baked containers: pastry shells, scalloped shells, or ramekins. Pâté shells here means pastry shells, not anything to do with liver pâté. Frozen puff-pastry shells or small toast cups do the job.
- YieldEnough for four small first courses, or two as a lunch on toast.
Creamed anything was the workhorse of the early-twentieth-century American table, and *The Butterick Cook Book* — issued by the dress-pattern company as part of its wider domestic-advice publishing — treats a cup of white sauce as a base that can absorb almost any cooked protein. The blue crab of the Chesapeake and the Atlantic seaboard was cheap and locally abundant, sold live by the dozen rather than by weight, which is why the recipe counts crabs instead of measuring meat. The cross-reference to the chafing-dish chapter is telling: creamed shellfish belonged to the fashionable late-night supper of the period, cooked at table over a spirit lamp, and Newburg-style sauces enriched with egg yolk, cream and sherry were the showpiece of that repertoire. The name Newburg is generally traced to Delmonico's in New York in the 1870s, though the details of the story are traditional rather than documented.