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Crab Meat, Maryland
Place one and a half pounds very fresh crab-meat flakes in a frying pan with half gill good sherry; season with a teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper, and a saltspoon grated nutmeg; place the pan on the fire and cook for five minutes, occasionally stirring with a wooden spoon; then pour in two gills cream and a half gill milk, mix a little and let gently boil for three minutes. Dilute two egg yolks in two tablespoons cream and add to the crab meat, continually mixing with a wooden spoon for three minutes longer, being careful not to allow to boil; remove from the fire, pour in a tablespoon good brandy, lightly mix, and serve in a chafing dish or a soup tureen.
A chafing-dish crab in a sherry-and-cream sauce thickened at the last moment with yolks. The whole dish stands or falls on that final step: once the yolks go in, the pan must never boil.
- The hinge: don't boil after the yolksTwo yolks in a cup of hot cream will thicken to a nappe consistency around 175-180F and curdle above about 185F. Pull the pan to a low flame or off the heat entirely, stir constantly, and stop when the sauce coats the spoon.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of sherry is 1/4 cup, two gills of cream is 1 cup, and the half gill of milk is another 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: two saltspoons cayenne is 1/2 teaspoon, which is assertive but in period character, and the nutmeg is 1/4 teaspoon.
- SaltA full teaspoon of salt for 1 1/2 lb of crab assumes unsalted picked meat. Pasteurized crab often carries added salt, so check the label; season lightly at the start and correct at the end.
- Crab meat"Very fresh crab-meat flakes" points to unpasteurized hand-picked meat, most likely blue crab given the title. Pasteurized lump or backfin in the tub is the practical modern equivalent. Drain it well and keep the stirring gentle, or the lumps break down into shreds.
- The five-minute startCrab meat is already cooked. The first five minutes with the sherry is there to drive off raw alcohol and let the meat take on the seasoning, not to cook the crab; keep the heat moderate and the stirring gentle.
- Sherry and brandyUse a dry amontillado or fino rather than anything labelled cooking sherry, which is salted. The tablespoon of brandy goes in off the heat and is meant to stay raw and aromatic.
- Yield and servingServes four as a light main course or six as a starter. It was intended to be kept warm in a chafing dish; over a candle or warmer it will hold for a short while, but a sauce this yolk-rich will break if it sits over direct heat. Serve on toast points or in pastry shells.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906); Filippini was for years a manager and chef at Delmonico's in New York, and his books preserve a great deal of the restaurant's late-nineteenth-century repertoire. The dish belongs to the chafing-dish vogue that swept American entertaining in the 1890s and 1900s, when a spirit lamp at the table let a host produce creamed oysters, lobster Newburg or crab in front of guests without a kitchen. The construction here — shellfish, sherry, cream, egg yolks, a final splash of brandy — is essentially the Newburg formula, which is generally traced to Delmonico's itself, applied to Chesapeake blue crab. The Maryland attribution is likely about the crab rather than any Maryland cooking method: by this period Chesapeake picking houses were shipping packed crab meat to northern cities, which is what made a dish like this possible on a New York table at all.