Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Minced Crabs
Minced Crabs
Place the finely chopped meat of three crabs into a saucepan, pour over one wineglassful of white wine and one of vinegar, and season to taste with salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper. Cook over a moderate fire for about ten minutes, and add two ounces of warmed butter, mixed with one boned anchovy, and stir in the well beaten yolks of two eggs. Sprinkle in sufficient breadcrumbs to thicken properly, turn the whole out on to a dish, and serve with parsley for a garnish.
Crabs, Queen Style Pick about a dozen hard-shell boiled crabs into as large pieces as possible; mix them in a salad bowl, with one-half breakfast cupful of sliced celery or shredded lettuce, one-half pinch of pepper, one pinch of salt, one tablespoonful of olive oil, and one and one-half tablespoonfuls of vinegar. Refill six well cleaned shells with the salad, and on each one lay one tablespoonful of mayonnaise sauce; and sprinkle over with chopped hard boiled egg, the yolk separated from the white, some crab or lobster coral, and one teaspoonful of chopped parsley, every article to be used separately in order that each color may be distinct. Serve on a dish with a folded napkin, or ornamental dish-paper.
Two crab preparations run together: a hot minced crab bound with egg and crumbs, and a cold dressed crab salad served back in the shell. Both assume you have picked the crabs yourself, and both assume a cook who knows when to stop stirring.
- The hinge: the yolksThe wine, vinegar and butter mixture is acidic and hot, and two raw yolks stirred straight in will curdle if the pan is still on a strong flame. Pull the saucepan off the heat, beat a spoonful of the hot liquid into the yolks first, then return the lot and stir over the lowest heat until it thickens.
- WineglassfulIn American cookbooks of this period a wineglass is about 2 fl oz, so a quarter cup each of white wine and vinegar. Note that this is a full half cup of liquid for the meat of three crabs, which is why breadcrumbs are needed to pull it back together.
- "Three crabs"The recipe does not say which crab; in a New York kitchen of the 1890s hard-shell blue crabs, boiled and picked, are the likeliest, giving only a few ounces of meat in total. If you are buying picked meat, work to weight rather than counting bodies; a single Dungeness would yield as much or more.
- Moderate fireOn a gas or electric hob this is medium-low. Ten minutes is to reduce the wine and vinegar and take the raw edge off them, not to cook the crab, which is already cooked.
- Boned anchovyA salt-packed anchovy rinsed and filleted, or one oil-packed fillet. Mash it into the warmed butter until it dissolves, otherwise you get salty threads rather than a background savour. Season with salt only after the anchovy is in.
- Breadcrumbs "to thicken properly"Dry, fine crumbs, added a spoonful at a time off the heat. Aim for a mixture that holds a soft mound on the spoon; the crumbs keep swelling for a minute or two after they go in, so stop short of what looks right.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is a large teacup, roughly 8 to 10 fl oz. Half of one is about half a cup of sliced celery, which is a modest amount against a dozen crabs' worth of meat.
- CoralThe orange roe found in female crabs and lobsters. It is edible and is used here purely as a colour, pressed through a sieve. If your crabs have none, paprika or sieved yolk covers the same ground.
- YieldThe minced crab serves two to three as a hot first course. Crabs Queen Style, filling six shells, is six portions; the empty top shells should be scrubbed and boiled before refilling.
Oscar Tschirky was never the Waldorf's chef but its maître d'hôtel, and his 1896 Cook Book is essentially the hotel's working repertoire set down in print, French method applied to whatever the New York markets sent up. Blue crabs from the Chesapeake and the New Jersey shore are said to have reached the city through the warm months, cheap enough to appear in chophouses and grand enough, once dressed and returned to the shell, for a hotel dining room. What dates both recipes most clearly is the insistence that every garnish be kept separate so that each colour reads distinctly on the plate: this is food built for a room where diners looked at each other's tables.