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Crab-Meat Flakes in Cases
Place one and a half pounds fresh crab-meat flakes in a frying pan with half a gill sherry, a teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne, a saltspoon grated nutmeg, and cook for five minutes on the range, occasionally mixing. Pour in two gills cream and one finely sliced truffle, lightly mix and boil for five minutes. Dilute two egg yolks with two table-spoons milk and add to the crab meat with a half ounce butter; gently mix while heating without boiling for three minutes, Remove, divide the preparation into six paper cases evenly, dress on a dish with a folded napkin, decorate with a little parsley greens and serve.
A French-style crab liaison from the era when Delmonico's kitchen vocabulary was still measured in gills and saltspoons. The whole dish stands or falls on the last three minutes.
- The hinge: the egg liaisonOnce the yolks go in, the mixture must not boil, or the yolks curdle and the sauce breaks into grains. Keep it below a simmer and pull it from the heat as soon as it thickens enough to coat a spoon.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of sherry is 1/4 cup and two gills of cream is 1 cup. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon, which makes two saltspoons of cayenne a full 1/2 teaspoon.
- Cayenne and saltHalf a teaspoon of cayenne in six small portions is aggressive by modern palates; a quarter teaspoon may suit better. The teaspoon of salt assumes unsalted fresh crab, so hold back and season at the end if using canned or pasteurized meat.
- Crab-meat flakesThis means picked cooked crab meat; period picking houses graded it, with 'flake' generally the smaller body meat as against the larger backfin or lump. Either will do here. It is already cooked, so the initial five minutes in the pan is about driving off the sherry and warming through, not cooking the crab. Handling it gently helps keep the pieces intact.
- TruffleThe recipe says only 'truffle'; sliced truffle was a common garnish in hotel kitchens of the period and is an expensive proposition now. A few drops of truffle oil or a spoonful of preserved truffle peelings gives the intended perfume, and the dish survives without it.
- Paper casesThese are caisses, small pleated paper or foil cups set on a baking sheet. Ramekins or small gratin dishes work as well; the recipe serves them warm rather than baked, so no oven is needed.
- SherryUse a dry amontillado or fino, not cream sherry. The sweetened bottlings sold as cooking sherry will read as cloying against the cayenne and nutmeg.
- YieldSix paper cases from a pound and a half of crab makes a first course, not a main. Allow two per person if serving it as lunch with bread and a salad.
Alexander Filippini spent decades in the Delmonico's kitchens in New York, and his cookbooks carry that restaurant's French idiom into the American home: en caisse service, truffle in the sauce, a yolk-and-cream liaison finished off the heat. Crab flakes appear so casually here because by the turn of the century the Chesapeake picking houses were shipping cooked, picked crab meat to city kitchens, which turned an awkward, labor-heavy shellfish into something closer to a convenience ingredient a chef could order by the pound, and the trade was bounded by the seasons of the fishery. The dish belongs to a whole family of period preparations built on the same logic — lobster Newburg, chicken à la king, chicken in cases — in which cooked protein is bound in enriched cream, spiked with sherry and cayenne, and served in an individual vessel. The folded napkin under the dish and the parsley greens on top are the last traces of a service style meant to be looked at before it was eaten.