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Fried Oyster Crabs
Place crabs in sieve and hold under a cold water faucet. Drain, roll in flour and fry in deep fat using a frying basket. Drain on paper and serve on a napkin laid on a platter garnished with four lemon baskets holding sauce tartare, two baskets being at the end of the latter and two on the sides. OYSTER CRABS IN BOUCHÉE CASES-Wash crabs by placing under running cold water, drain, roll in flour, dip in milk and then in fine bread crumbs. Fry in deep fat and drain on paper. Fill pastry or paper cases with the fried oyster crabs and serve very hot.
Two versions of the same thing: tiny pea crabs, floured or breaded, fried hard and fast. The whole dish hinges on the frying being brief, and on your being able to get the crabs at all.
- What an oyster crab isPinnotheres ostreum, the pea crab, a soft-shelled commensal that lives inside the mantle of an eastern oyster. They are eaten whole, shell and all, and are about the size of a thumbnail. They are not sold in supermarkets; historically they came as a by-product of shucking houses, and today you would need a shucker willing to save them for you, or a good deal of luck shucking your own.
- Fat temperature"Deep fat" of the period was conventionally tested by browning a bread cube in about forty seconds, reckoned at roughly 375F. Cooler than that and the crabs absorb fat and go limp rather than crisp.
- TimingThe original gives none, and that matters more here than anywhere else. At 375F these are done in 30 to 60 seconds, as soon as they stop hissing and turn pale gold. A minute past that and they taste scorched, since there is nothing inside but a scrap of flesh.
- The frying basketEssential, not optional. The crabs are small enough to sink into the bottom of the pan and burn, and a fine-mesh basket or spider lets you lift the whole batch out at once.
- Bouchée casesBouchee cases -- small round puff-pastry shells with the centre lifted out, in effect a miniature vol-au-vent and much the same thing as the modern frozen shell. Any 2-inch pastry shell serves; the "paper cases" would have been the pleated paper cups then used for baking and serving small portions.
- Sauce tartare and lemon basketsA lemon basket is made by cutting two wedges from the top, leaving a band of peel arched across as a handle, then hollowing the flesh and notching the rim. The tartare of the period was mayonnaise with chopped capers, gherkins, onion and parsley.
- The napkinA folded linen napkin under fried food was a common service of the period, usually explained as absorbing residual fat. A paper-lined platter does the same job and does not have to be laundered.
- YieldNo quantity is given. Oyster crabs were customarily sold by the pint, and a pint, floured and fried, will fill several small pastry cases.
Oyster crabs were a genuine luxury of the American Atlantic coast in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and appear on hotel and oyster-house menus in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore alongside terrapin and canvasback duck. Their scarcity was structural: only a fraction of oysters harbour a crab, so a restaurant needed a large shucking operation behind it to accumulate a pint. A mass-market volume like the Butterick book prints the recipe without a quantity or a source, offering the reader the form of a fashionable restaurant dish, garnish diagram and all. The same crab is still eaten in a few oyster towns.