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Scalloped Crabs in Shells or Ramekins
Make one pint of thin white sauce; add a little chopped parsley, a teaspoon of onion juice, pepper and salt.
Mix with this one and one-half cups of crab meat and one-half cup of stale bread crumbs. Fill the shells or ramekins, place buttered crumbs on top and brown in the oven.
CRABS (Soft Shell) CRABS should be vigorously alive when purchased, or the meat is not good; and they should not be dressed until just before they are wanted. To dress crabs is not difficult if the directions are carefully followed. The back of the crab at each side tapers to a point. Lay the crab on its face, take one of these points between the thumb and forefinger of the left hand, press the back with the second finger, bending the shell back about half way. There will thus be exposed a spongy substance, all of which must be pulled off. Repeat the operation at the other point on the opposite side. The apron, a small, loose sort of tail running to a point at the middle of the under shell and closely lapping it, should be pulled off. The sand-bags are found just under the eyes. Cut an opening in the crab just back of the eyes and extract these two bags. Wash the crabs in cold water and they are ready for cooking.
A straightforward creamed-crab gratin from a period when every kitchen kept a white sauce on standby. The instructions assume you already know two things the text never states: the proportions of a thin sauce, and how hot the oven should be.
- Thin white sauceIn Butterick-era usage, thin white sauce is one tablespoon each of butter and flour per cup of milk; a pint therefore takes two of each. A medium sauce (two tablespoons per cup) will set stiff once the crumbs go in, so keep it deliberately loose.
- Oven heat"Brown in the oven" implies a hot oven and a short stay; the book gives no temperature. A modern equivalent would be roughly 425F for 12 to 15 minutes, or a few minutes under the broiler. Everything in the dish is already cooked, so you are only heating through and colouring the top.
- Crab meatA cup and a half is roughly 8 ounces of picked meat. Refrigerated pasteurized lump or backfin from the fish counter is the closest modern equivalent; pick it over for shell and cartilage, and fold rather than stir so the lumps survive.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion on a microplane and use the liquid and pulp that collect, or press grated onion in a sieve. A teaspoon is assertive in this quantity of sauce; start with half.
- Stale bread crumbsNot the fine dry crumbs sold in canisters. Day-old white bread torn or grated into soft crumbs absorbs sauce without going pasty. For the topping, toss fresh crumbs with melted butter, about two tablespoons of butter to half a cup of crumbs.
- The shellsCleaned and scrubbed crab backs were used for this purpose and could be kept and reused. Four- to six-ounce ramekins, gratin dishes or scallop shells all work; fill them level rather than heaped so the centre heats before the top burns.
- YieldEnough for four generous ramekins as a first course, or six smaller ones. Serve immediately, while the sauce is still fluid under the crust.
- The soft-shell paragraphThe dressing instructions that follow the recipe belong to a separate entry and are not part of this dish. The "spongy substance" under the points is the gills, and the "sand-bags" behind the eyes are the stomach; both are still removed the same way today.
Baked crab in the shell was standard on American tables wherever blue crabs were landed, from Chesapeake Bay north to New England, and the ramekin alternative offered a tidier way to serve it. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued its cook book in 1911 for exactly the reader who owned ramekins but not a crab pot. The white-sauce base is the familiar roux-and-milk foundation, of a kind popularized in the Boston Cooking School tradition, that turns almost any cooked flesh into a scallop. Note that the book still assumes crabs come in alive and are dressed at home, a habit that survived far longer in coastal households than the recipe's genteel ramekin presentation might suggest.