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Deviled Crabs
Put one-half pound of butter into a saucepan with one tablespoonful of flour, and cook together, stirring it continually to prevent its burning; add to it one large tumblerful of rich cream, one boiled soft onion mashed to a paste or pulp, a little grated nutmeg, and season with salt and cayenne pepper. Then put in the crab meat, enough to fill eight crab shells and a raw egg or two, stir all together well and cook until it begins to thicken, which will only take a few minutes; then pour it all on a flat dish and allow it to stand until cold. Now fill the back crab shells with the mixture, egg them over with a brush and cover with grated breadcrumbs or cracker dust. Place them in a bakingpan, put a small lump of butter on top of each, and bake in a slow oven to a light brown color, or fry them in plenty of hot lard.
A rich crab mixture bound like a thick cream sauce, chilled firm, then packed back into the shells and browned. The chilling step is not optional — it is what lets you shape and crumb the filling.
- The tumblerA tumblerful is usually reckoned at about 8 fl oz, so roughly one cup of cream. "Rich cream" means a high-fat, unhomogenised cream; modern heavy cream is the nearest substitute.
- That much butterHalf a pound of butter to one tablespoon of flour is not a roux in the modern sense; it is a very loose emulsion that sets only when cold. If you want a filling that holds its shape at room temperature, cut the butter to about 4 tablespoons and raise the flour to 3, which gives a proper thick béchamel.
- Oven temperatureA "slow oven" is about 300°F, which will heat the shells through but browns crumbs very slowly. For a light brown crust in 15–20 minutes, 375–400°F is the practical range; the filling is already cooked, so you are only browning.
- Quantity of crabEight crab shells takes roughly 1 to 1½ lb of picked crab meat. Lump or backfin holds its texture; claw meat is cheaper and stronger in flavor.
- The shellsIf you have no shells, individual ramekins or gratin dishes work. Real shells must be scrubbed and boiled before reuse — they are cooking vessels, and the recipe assumes you saved them from picking the crabs.
- The raw eggThe one or two eggs go into the hot mixture and cook there, and the egg wash on top sets in the oven. Stir the eggs in off the direct heat or work quickly, or they will scramble in visible threads.
- Cool it completely"Allow it to stand until cold" means thoroughly chilled, ideally an hour or more in the refrigerator. Warm filling will not take an egg wash or hold crumbs, and it will slump out of the shells.
- Frying optionThe recipe offers frying in hot lard as an alternative to baking. A firmer, lower-butter mixture shaped into cakes is easier to handle in fat than filled shells, so baking is the simpler route for shell-filled crabs.
- ServingEight shells serves eight as a first course or four as a main with something sharp alongside — lemon, or a mustard-dressed salad to cut the butter.
Deviled crab belongs to the same nineteenth-century family as devilled kidneys and devilled ham: "devil" signaled heat, here cayenne, and the treatment was often applied to shellfish on hotel and club menus. It comes from a moment when American crab cookery was strongly regional u2014 blue crab from the Chesapeake and the New Jersey shore reached New York in quantity, and returning the picked meat to its own scrubbed shell was both economy and presentation, a plated dish that arrived looking like the animal it came from. The nutmeg and the boiled onion pulp are older habits, closer to Anglo-American cream sauces than to the mustard-forward deviled crab that later became standard in Maryland and Tampa, where Spanish and Cuban cooks made the deep-fried croqueta version their own.