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Crab Meat, Dewey
Have one pound of crab meat flakes on a plate with a pint of very fresh oysters crabs. Heat a tablespoon butter in a sautoire, add one small seeded green pepper and six sliced, peeled and well-cleaned fresh mushrooms, then gently brown five minutes, lightly stirring meanwhile. Add crab meat and oyster crabs, season with a level teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne and one saltspoon grated nutmeg, adding also one small sliced truffle and one gill sherry; gently mix, cover pan and let cook five minutes. Pour in a half gill milk and one and a half gills cream, carefully mix with wooden spoon and slowly boil for fifteen minutes. Dilute two egg yolks with two tablespoons cream and add to pan. Lightly mix with spoon while heating without boiling for three minutes, remove, pour into a chafing dish or soup tureen and serve.
A chafing-dish course from the era when creamed shellfish was supper-party food. Two things decide whether it works: the egg liaison at the end, which must never boil, and the fact that a pint of oyster crabs is essentially unobtainable now.
- Oyster crabsThe pea-sized commensal crabs that live inside live oysters, once sold by the pint in eastern markets and prized whole and soft-shelled. They are effectively a specialty item today; leave them out and increase the crab meat to a pound and a half, or add a handful of small peeled shrimp for texture.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so the sherry is 1/2 cup, the milk 1/4 cup and the cream 3/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making the cayenne 1/2 teaspoon and the nutmeg 1/4 teaspoon.
- SautoireA straight-sided sauté pan, wide and shallow with a lid. Anything of that shape holding about three quarts will do; the width matters because the cream needs surface area to reduce.
- The fifteen-minute boil"Slowly boil" here means a bare simmer to reduce and thicken the cream. At a real boil the cream will break and the crab will turn stringy. Keep it at a lazy bubble and stir with the wooden spoon the recipe specifies.
- The yolk liaisonThis is the hinge. Once the yolks and cream go in, hold the pan below a simmer for the three minutes and stir constantly; above roughly 180F the yolks curdle and the sauce goes grainy. Tempering a ladle of the hot cream into the yolks first is safer than adding them cold.
- Crab meatBuy pasteurized lump or backfin and fold it in gently at the point indicated. It is already cooked, so the five-minute covered stage and the reduction are all the heat it needs.
- TruffleA single small sliced truffle was a normal restaurant garnish in this period. A teaspoon of truffle paste, or nothing at all, is a reasonable substitute; truffle oil added at this stage cooks off to nothing useful.
- CayenneHalf a teaspoon in a sauce that starts at well under two cups and then reduces is assertive. Add half of it, taste after the cream reduces, and adjust.
- YieldServes four as a first course or supper dish, two as a main. It does not hold or reheat once the yolks are in.
Alexander Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and this recipe carries the house's habits: a sautoire, a truffle, a liaison of yolks and cream, and a name honoring a public figure. Dewey is Admiral George Dewey, whose victory at Manila Bay in 1898 made him briefly the most celebrated man in America; restaurants of the period attached his name to a great many dishes, as they had to Nelson. The oyster crabs are the giveaway of the period and the place. Those tiny soft-bodied crabs, found living inside the shells of oysters, were a genuine luxury on the Atlantic coast in the nineteenth century, sold by the pint and usually fried whole or folded into cream; they largely disappeared from the market as oyster beds declined and shucking moved out of the retail shop.