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Crabs in Shells
Boil a few crabs, pick out the meat and place the coral on one side. Chop up the meat, add to it one onion, ground ginger, lemon juice, mushroom catsup, salt and pepper; put the mixture into a fryingpan with butter and cook until the butter is absorbed. Pour in a little stock, boil until nearly evaporated, then remove the pan from the fire. Butter five of the crab shells and fill them with the mixture. Grind the coral, mingle it with some breadcrumbs, sprinkle this over the mixture, put a few small lumps of butter on the tops, place the shells in the oven, and bake for a few minutes.
A late-Victorian hotel version of dressed crab, written in the shorthand a professional kitchen could fill in for itself. The gaps worth closing are the quantities, the catsup, and the oven.
- How many crabsThe recipe fills five shells, so figure at least five hard-shell crabs of a size worth stuffing, plus five cleaned top shells; roughly a pound of picked meat will fill them. Yields per crab vary a great deal by species and size, so buying picked meat and a few extra shells is the practical route.
- CoralThe coral is the orange roe of a female crab, along with the soft tomalley. Male crabs have none, and pasteurised tub crabmeat never includes it. If you cannot get it, the breadcrumb topping still works; it simply loses the colour and the concentrated flavour.
- Mushroom catsupNot tomato ketchup. Mushroom catsup is a thin, dark, salty mushroom-and-spice liquid, closer to Worcestershire or a light soy in body. It is still sold by British specialty grocers; a teaspoon or two is enough for this quantity, and Worcestershire is the usual substitute.
- The onionThe recipe does not say how the onion is cut; a fine mince is the sensible reading. It goes in raw with the crab and gets only a few minutes in the pan, so softening it in the butter first will keep it from staying sharp and crunchy.
- Ginger and lemonGround ginger here is the dried spice, best used with a light hand -- about a quarter teaspoon for a pound of crab. The recipe adds the lemon juice with the other seasonings before frying; holding it back until off the heat keeps it fresher.
- StockA quarter cup is ample. The point is to moisten the mixture and then drive most of it off again, leaving the crab bound rather than wet.
- The ovenThe book gives no temperatures. "A few minutes" implies a hot oven; around 425F is a reasonable modern equivalent, long enough to brown the crumbs and melt the butter -- five to eight minutes. The crab is already cooked, and reheating it further makes it stringy. A minute under the broiler does the same job.
- The shellsOnly the hard top shell (the carapace) is used. Scrub it, boil it briefly, and dry it. Small ceramic gratin dishes or scallop shells stand in without complaint.
- YieldFive filled shells, which is five first courses or a light lunch for two or three.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, and his 1896 Cook Book is essentially a working record of what a large American hotel kitchen of the period could put out -- French classics, English chophouse dishes, and a great many oyster and crab preparations, since both were still cheap and abundant on the Atlantic coast. Stuffed crab served back in its own shell is far older than the Waldorf and appears in English cookery books through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as "buttered crab" in the eighteenth-century books and, later and chiefly in the nineteenth century, as "dressed crab," and the seasonings here -- dried ginger, lemon, mushroom catsup -- are squarely in that English tradition rather than the French one. Mushroom catsup itself was a standard larder item before commercial tomato ketchup displaced it, a bottled liquid made by salting mushrooms, drawing off the liquor and spicing it; recipes for making it at home run through the same books that give this dish.