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Fried Soft-Shell Crabs
Have a dish of cracker dust mixed with a little pepper and on the stove a pan half full of smoking hot fat; beat two eggs, roll the crabs in the crumbs and dip them in the eggs, then roll them again in the crumbs and put in the hot fat to fry. Take them out with a skimmer, lay on brown paper to free them from grease and serve them while hot.
Oscar assumes a cook who already knows how to dress a soft-shell crab and judge fat by its shimmer. Both of those omissions are worth filling in.
- The crabs must be cleaned firstThe recipe begins at the breading, but a soft-shell crab needs the face snipped off behind the eyes, the apron folded back and pulled away, and the gills lifted from under each point of the shell. Nothing else in the dish matters if this is skipped, and it is best done shortly before frying.
- Cracker dustFinely rolled soda or water crackers, closer to a coarse flour than to breadcrumbs. Unsalted saltines pulsed in a food processor give the same result; season with salt as well as the pepper called for, since modern crackers vary.
- "Smoking hot fat"The phrase seems to indicate fat at the top of its working range. Use 350-375F and check with a thermometer rather than by smoke, which in many modern oils means the fat has already begun to break down.
- Pan half fullThis is deep frying, not shallow. A deep, heavy pan filled no more than halfway leaves room for the violent bubbling a wet crab produces; a spatter screen is sensible, as soft-shells pop.
- Order of coatingCrumb, egg, crumb, as written. Patting the crabs dry before the first crumbing makes the coat adhere; two beaten eggs will handle four to six crabs.
- TimingTwo to three minutes total for a medium crab, until the shell turns rusty orange and the coating sets. Longer and the body dries out and the legs go brittle.
- DrainingBrown paper was the standard drain of the period. A wire rack over a sheet pan is better, since paper traps steam under the crab and softens the crust.
- Yield and servingTwo crabs make a main portion, one an appetizer. Lemon, tartar sauce, or the brown butter and caper treatment are all period-appropriate.
Soft-shell crabs are blue crabs caught in the few hours after molting, before the new shell hardens, and the trade in them was built on the Chesapeake and the Jersey and Long Island shores that supplied New York's markets. By the time Oscar Tschirky was running the Waldorf's dining rooms at the turn of the twentieth century, they were a seasonal luxury on hotel menus up and down Fifth Avenue, arriving live and packed in seaweed or damp straw, and their season, roughly May into September, was one of the fixed points of the American restaurant calendar. The brevity of the instruction here is characteristic of Oscar's book, which was written for people who already cooked professionally or who kept a cook: the hard part, the dressing of the crab, is passed over in silence because no one in a hotel kitchen needed to be told.