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Crab Meat Fritters
Place in a bowl six ounces flour, crack in three fresh eggs, add one and a half gills cold milk, a half teaspoon baking powder, half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons white pepper, one saltspoon grated nutmeg, half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, the juice of quarter sound lemon, and sharply mix with a whisk three minutes. Add one pound fresh crab meat flakes and lightly mix with a wooden spoon three minutes. Heat three tablespoons lard in a large frying pan, take up a tablespoon of the preparation and drop in the pan in cake form, and proceed in same way until preparation is all dropped in the pan, then gently fry until a nice golden colour, or three minutes on each side. Remove, drain on a cloth, dress on a dish with a folded napkin, decorate with six quarters of lemon and a little parsley greens and serve.
A straightforward batter-bound crab cake, written in the clipped Delmonico house style with weights and old spoon measures. Two conversions and one warning about handling the crab are all it really needs.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of milk is 3/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making the pepper half a teaspoon and the nutmeg a quarter.
- Flour by weightSix ounces of flour is about 1 1/3 cups scooped and levelled. Weigh it if you can: the batter is meant to be thick enough to hold a tablespoon of crab in a mound, and an extra ounce of flour makes it stodgy.
- The hinge is the second mixingWhisk the batter hard, then fold the crab in with a wooden spoon and stop as soon as it is coated. Three minutes of folding is generous; lump crab shreds into mush if worked, and the fritters lose the texture that justifies using crab at all.
- Crab meat"Fresh crab meat flakes" would most likely have meant picked blue crab on the East Coast, bought fresh rather than canned. Refrigerated pasteurized lump or backfin works; drain it well and pick it over for shell and cartilage. Avoid canned claw packed in liquid, which will thin the batter.
- Fat and heatThree tablespoons of lard in a large pan is a shallow pan-fry, not deep frying. Keep the fat at a steady medium, around 350F, and add more as the fritters absorb it. Neutral oil or clarified butter substitutes directly, though lard browns most evenly.
- Three minutes a sideThat timing is right for tablespoon-sized cakes about half an inch thick. Larger mounds need the heat lowered a little or the outside colours before the batter sets in the middle.
- Draining"Drain on a cloth" means a kitchen cloth; a rack over paper towels keeps the undersides crisper than laying them flat.
- Yield and serviceA pound of crab in this batter, dropped by the tablespoon, makes a large number of small fritters, enough for four as a main course or six as a first course. The folded napkin on the platter was standard restaurant presentation, meant to absorb fat and hold the fritters upright; a warm plate does the same job.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), and it reads like what it is: kitchen shorthand from a man who spent decades at Delmonico's in New York, where dishes were dictated in ounces, gills and saltspoons and finished on a folded napkin with lemon quarters. Crab fritters of this kind sit between the French beignet and the American crab cake, using an egg-and-flour batter to bind rather than the breadcrumbs that later became standard along the Chesapeake. Blue crab was cheap and abundant on the East Coast at the turn of the century, picked meat arriving daily in city markets, which is why Filippini can call for a full pound without comment. The nutmeg is the older touch here: grated nutmeg in shellfish and forcemeat batters was routine in nineteenth-century professional cooking and has largely dropped out of the modern seafood repertoire.