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Broiled Soft Shell Crabs
Remove the spongy parts under the side points and the aprons from twelve very fresh soft shell crabs, thoroughly wash and drain on a cloth. Mix on a plate a tablespoon oil with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, repeatedly turn in seasoning, arrange on a double broiler and broil five minutes on each side. Dress on freshly prepared pieces of toast placed on a hot dish, decorate with six quarters lemon and a little fried parsley and serve.
A clean, unbreaded treatment of soft shell crabs that depends almost entirely on the crabs being alive when you start. Everything else is seasoning and timing.
- "Very fresh" means aliveSoft shells deteriorate rapidly once dead and should be bought kicking, then cleaned no more than an hour or two before cooking. A fishmonger will clean them on request; frozen ones, thawed and patted very dry, are the fallback.
- The cleaning, in modern termsThe "spongy parts under the side points" are the gills, exposed by lifting each pointed side of the top shell. The "apron" is the flap folded under the belly. Modern cleaning instructions usually also call for snipping off the face just behind the eyes, a step this recipe omits.
- Double broilerA hinged wire grilling basket, not a double boiler. It holds the crabs flat so they can be turned as a batch without tearing legs off. A fish grilling basket or a flat rack over a charcoal grill does the same job.
- Under a modern broilerSet the oven broiler to high and the rack about 4 inches from the element. Five minutes a side is right for large crabs; smaller ones need three to four, and they are done when the shell has turned red-orange and the legs are crisp at the tips.
- A tablespoon of oil for twelve crabsThat is a thin film at best. Brush each crab lightly on both sides and expect to use two or three tablespoons in practice; the seasoning otherwise will not adhere.
- Fried parsleyFlat-leaf sprigs, thoroughly dried, dropped into 350F oil for 15 to 20 seconds until they stop hissing. Wet parsley in hot fat spits violently.
- YieldTwelve crabs and six lemon quarters point to six servings, two crabs each, as a course rather than a whole dinner.
Soft shell crabs are blue crabs (Callinectes sapidus) taken in the few hours after they molt, before the new shell hardens — a matter of timing rather than of species, and the reason the trade has always been seasonal and local, concentrated on the Chesapeake and the mid-Atlantic coast. By the time The International Cook Book appeared, they had reached hotel menus well inland, far from tidewater, which is why a dish this perishable turns up in a general international collection at all. Broiling rather than the more familiar flour-and-fry treatment is often taken as a sign of the restaurant version: the toast underneath appears to be there to catch the liquor from the shell, and the lemon and fried parsley were a common hotel garnish of the period, said to have been used on grilled fish and cutlets alike.