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Fried Soft-Shell Crabs
Dip the crabs in beaten egg, then in rolled bread dust seasoned with salt and pepper. Have the frying-pan hot and enough butter in it to keep the fish from burning. Fry as quickly as possible. All shell fish require rapid cooking, else the juice escapes and the food will be tough. They should cook in from eight to ten minutes and be of a deep red color when done.
A terse late-Victorian formula that assumes you bought the crabs already dressed and that your stove ran hot. Two things need attention: the cleaning the recipe skips, and the cooking time it overstates.
- Dress them firstThe recipe begins with the crabs ready to cook. If yours are whole and live, snip off the face behind the eyes, lift each side of the top shell and pull out the feathery gills, and remove the pointed apron on the underside. A fishmonger will do this on request; cook them within a few hours of cleaning.
- "Rolled bread dust"Dry bread crusts crushed fine with a rolling pin — in other words fine dry breadcrumbs, not fresh ones and not panko. Sifted plain dry crumbs give the closest result.
- Eight to ten minutes is too longEight to ten minutes is longer than needed -- a medium soft-shell wants about three minutes on the first side and two on the second, over medium-high heat. Past that the body meat dries and the crab goes leathery -- the very fault the recipe warns against.
- Butter alone will burn"Enough butter to keep the fish from burning" means a shallow pool, not a smear, and whole butter at frying heat browns fast. Use clarified butter, or half butter and half a neutral oil, and enough to come a little way up the crab.
- "Deep red" is relativeSoft-shells do not turn the bright scarlet of a boiled hard crab. Expect a russet-orange shell under a golden crust; that colour change plus firm, opaque body meat is the doneness cue.
- Expect spatteringSoft-shells hold water inside the shell and pop audibly in hot fat. Pat them very dry before egging, lay them in the pan shell-side down first, and keep a spatter screen to hand.
- YieldTwo crabs per person as a main course, one as a first course. Fry in batches rather than crowding the pan; crowded crabs steam and the crust softens.
Soft-shell crabs are not a species but a stage: blue crabs (Callinectes sapidus) taken in the hours after they shed their old shell and before the new one hardens, so the whole animal can be eaten. The fishery around Chesapeake Bay grew commercially significant in the second half of the nineteenth century, once ice and rail could move a perishable, briefly available product to New York and Philadelphia hotel kitchens, and by the time this book appeared soft-shells were a familiar spring and summer luxury on Eastern seaboard menus. The recipe's insistence that "all shell fish require rapid cooking, else the juice escapes and the food will be tough" is the standard advice of the period, and it is sound in principle even though the eight to ten minutes prescribed would now be judged excessive. The Butterick Publishing Company, far better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued cookery and household volumes as part of a broad line of domestic guidance aimed at the same middle-class readership.