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Crab Sauce
Put three cupfuls of milk into a saucepan, add two ounces of butter rolled in flour; it should be stirred in one direction only. Cut up the meat from a crab and mix with a little mace, cayenne and salt; stir in the boiled milk and let it simmer for three minutes, but do not let it boil.
A thin white sauce enriched with picked crab, of the kind served over poached or boiled fish. The original assumes you know how to build a milk sauce and gives no quantity for the crab.
- The hinge: keep it below a simmerOnce the crab goes in, the sauce must stay under the boil. Crab meat is already cooked; boiling it in milk squeezes out water, toughens the fibres and can make the sauce break. Three minutes at a bare tremble is exactly right.
- "Butter rolled in flour"Butter worked or dredged with flour, close to what is now called beurre manie: 2 oz (4 tablespoons) softened butter kneaded with flour -- up to an equal volume, about 1/4 cup -- then whisked into the hot milk in small lumps. Period directions of this kind usually mean rather less flour than butter, so add it in stages and stop when the sauce coats.
- Stirring "in one direction only"Kitchen folklore rather than chemistry. What matters is constant motion and a whisk that reaches the corners of the pan, so the flour disperses before it can set into lumps.
- How much crabNo amount is given. About 1 cup of picked lump or claw meat, roughly 6 oz, suits three cupfuls of milk; more than that and it becomes a stew rather than a sauce. Pick it over for shell and cartilage first.
- MaceThe dried outer covering of the nutmeg, milder and less sweet than the seed. Ground mace is still sold; a scant 1/4 teaspoon is a "little." Nutmeg at half the quantity is the nearest substitute.
- Order of operationsThe text reads as though the crab is mixed first and the milk poured over it, but the sauce is easier to control the other way: thicken the milk, season, then fold in the crab off the strongest heat.
- Yield and servingMakes about 4 cups, enough for six to eight portions of fish. Salt at the end, since crab meat, and canned or pasteurised crab in particular, is already saline.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection is associated with the Waldorf, though Oscar was the hotel's maitre d'hotel rather than its chef and much of the book is compiled rather than a transcript of the kitchen's output. Sauces like this one belonged to a familiar system: boiled or poached fish went to the table plain and was dressed at the last moment from a rank of milk- and butter-based sauces held warm. Crab sauce is an American branch of that family, drawing on the Atlantic blue crab landed along the Chesapeake and shipped north as picked meat in ice, a trade well established by the end of the century. Mace is the older note here: it was a standard aromatic for fish and shellfish in English cookery long before cayenne became common, and its presence in a New York hotel sauce suggests how much of the repertoire came by way of the English kitchen.