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Crab Meat, Finnoise
Place on a plate one and a half pounds fresh crab-meat flakes and keep till required. Finely chop two sound, seeded, medium green peppers, place in a small saucepan with a tablespoon melted butter and cook for five minutes, lightly stirring once in a while. Pour in one and a half gills pure tomato juice and a gill tomato sauce, add six finely sliced canned mushrooms, and let boil for five minutes. Mix on a saucer an ounce butter with half ounce flour, then add it little by little to the sauce, sharply mixing while adding. Add the crab meat, season with a light teaspoon salt, lightly mix, then cook for eight minutes, gently stirring once in a while. Dress on a deep dish, arrange six heart-shaped bread croutons around and serve.
A straightforward sauté of cooked crab in a peppery tomato sauce, thickened at the end with beurre manié. The main adjustments are the archaic liquid measures and the length of time the crab is left on the heat.
- GillsA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz). So one and a half gills of tomato juice is 3/4 cup, and a gill of tomato sauce is 1/2 cup.
- Crab meat"Fresh crab-meat flakes" means picked, already-cooked meat from the fishmonger. A pound and a half is a generous amount; pick it over for shell and cartilage before it goes in.
- The eight-minute cookThe crab is already cooked, and eight more minutes at a simmer will turn lump meat stringy and dry. Fold it in, bring the sauce back to a bare simmer, and give it two to three minutes to heat through. The instruction to stir only "once in a while" is sound advice for a different reason — the less you move it, the more the lumps stay whole.
- Beurre maniéAn ounce of butter kneaded with half an ounce of flour is a classic beurre manié, roughly 2 tablespoons butter to 2 tablespoons flour. Add it in small pieces off a rapid boil, whisking each one in, and let the sauce simmer a minute or two afterwards so the flour loses its raw taste.
- Tomato sauceIn a 1900s professional kitchen this meant a cooked, seasoned sauce tomate, not the sweetened jarred pasta sauce sold today. Passata simmered briefly with a little onion, or a plain canned tomato sauce with no added sugar or herbs, is closer to the intent.
- Canned mushroomsCanned mushrooms turn up routinely in recipes of this period. Fresh button mushrooms, sliced and sweated with the peppers, give better texture; use about 3 oz.
- CroutonsCut white bread into hearts with a cutter or a knife and fry in clarified butter until golden on both sides. Arrange them at the last moment so they do not soften in the sauce.
- YieldServes four as a main course, six as a first course — the six croutons suggest the author had six portions in mind.
Finnoise is French kitchen shorthand for "in the Finnish style," and in the classical repertoire it generally signals sweet green peppers, sometimes with paprika, worked into a tomato-based sauce. The association is culinary convention rather than anything documented in Finnish cooking. The book in question is The International Cook Book, compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's: dishes are named by the French system and arranged as a working professional would think of them, with a national tag standing in for a fixed set of ingredients.