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Crab Meat Au Gratin
Heat half ounce butter in a small saucepan with two level tablespoons flour for one minute, lightly stirring meanwhile; pour in one and a half gills hot milk and half gill cream; briskly mix with a whisk and let come to a boil. Place three-quarters of pound fresh crab meat in a small saucepan with half gill good sherry. Season with half teaspoon salt, a saltspoon cayenne pepper and half saltspoon ground nutmeg; gently mix with a spoon and let slowly cook for five minutes. Strain the above cream sauce through a Chinese strainer into the crab-meat pan, adding six sliced canned mushrooms; lightly mix and allow to slowly boil for five minutes. Pour the preparation into a deep baking dish, sprinkle a tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese over and set in the oven to bake for ten minutes, or until a nice golden colour. Remove and serve.
A straightforward béchamel-and-crab gratin from the era when a gill was a standard measure and no cook expected an oven temperature in print. A few conversions and one timing adjustment are all it needs.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of hot milk is 3/4 cup, and half a gill of cream or sherry is 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, meaning a scant 1/4 teaspoon cayenne and 1/8 teaspoon nutmeg.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; ranges of the period were generally judged by feel rather than by a dial. The dish is already cooked through and only needs browning: 400-425F for the ten minutes stated, or a few minutes under the broiler.
- Don't overcook the crabThe crab is simmered five minutes in sherry, then five more in the sauce, then baked. Picked crab meat is already cooked, and this much heat shreds it to threads. Warm it in the sherry for a minute, fold in the finished sauce, and let the oven do the rest.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. Straining a smooth roux-based sauce is optional; the point in a professional kitchen was catching flour lumps.
- Half an ounce of butterOne tablespoon, paired with two tablespoons of flour. That is a lean roux for a cup of liquid and produces a sauce thick enough to hold the crab without running in the dish.
- Canned mushroomsSix sliced canned mushroom caps were a pantry standard in 1906. Two or three fresh cremini, sliced and sautéed dry until their water has gone, give better flavour and will not thin the sauce.
- ParmesanA tablespoon of grated Parmesan over the top is enough to colour but not to crust. For a firmer gratin, mix the cheese with a spoonful of fresh breadcrumbs.
- YieldThree-quarters of a pound of crab in a deep dish serves three as a first course, or two generously as a supper dish with toast.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book, published in 1906 by a chef long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and it reads like restaurant work written down: weights in ounces, liquids in gills, cayenne and nutmeg used with a professional's restraint. Au gratin means simply cooked with a browned surface, from the French gratter, to scrape — originally the crust scraped from the dish. Crab meat au gratin belonged to a whole family of American hotel dishes built on a cream sauce, a little sherry and a shellfish: lobster Newburg, oysters à la poulette, deviled crab. Sherry with crab seems to have been close to standard in the period, and canned mushrooms, then a modern convenience rather than a compromise, appear elsewhere in the book. That Filippini expected his reader to own a chinois and to know what a saltspoon held says a good deal about who these "international" cookbooks were addressed to.