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Crab-Meat Patties
Prepare and keep hot six small patties. Have one and a half pounds crab meat in a sautoire with a half gill sherry and teaspoon salt, cover pan and keep on range till required. Mix in a small saucepan two tablespoons melted butter with two light tablespoons flour, pour in one gill each milk and cream, season with saltspoon each cayenne and grated nutmeg, mix on fire until it comes to a boil, then pour sauce into crab-meat pan, mix well and let cook for five minutes. Dilute two egg yolks with two tablespoons cream, the juice of quarter of a lemon, and add to pan, then gently mix with wooden spoon for three minutes, but do not allow to boil again. Dress the six patties on a hot dish, evenly divide crab meat in them, place covers on and serve.
A classic egg-yolk liaison built on a thin b uchamel, spooned into pastry shells. The only real difficulty is the finish, which will scramble if it boils.
- The hinge: the yolk liaisonOnce the yolks and cream go in, the pan must stay below a simmer – roughly 160–180F. Pull it off the burner entirely and stir over residual heat; a single boil curdles the sauce into grainy threads that cannot be brought back.
- "Patties" are pastry shellsNot meat patties. These are baked puff-pastry cases with a lifted lid – bouchées or vol-au-vents. Frozen puff pastry shells work, or ready-made "patty shells" where they can still be found. Bake them ahead and hold them warm in a low oven so they stay crisp.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so a half gill of sherry is 1/4 cup and a gill each of milk and cream is 1/2 cup each. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, which makes 1/4 teaspoon cayenne a genuinely warm seasoning for six servings – halve it if you want the crab forward.
- SautoireA straight-sided sauté pan or wide skillet with a lid. Nothing special is needed; the width matters more than the depth so the crab heats without being stirred to shreds.
- Crab meatA pound and a half of picked meat. Lump or backfin blue crab suits the sauce well; pick through it for shell and cartilage, and fold rather than stir so the lumps survive.
- "Keep on range till required"On a range of the period this meant a cooler part of the stovetop. Use the lowest burner setting or a warm oven – crab held at a simmer in sherry for any length of time turns stringy and watery.
- The rouxTwo tablespoons butter to two tablespoons flour with a cup of liquid gives a light sauce. Cook the flour a minute before adding the milk and cream so it does not taste raw, but keep it pale.
- YieldSix filled shells, ample as a first course or a light lunch with a salad. The filling does not hold or reheat; assemble and serve at once or the pastry softens.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), and it is a fair sample of how a Delmonico's-trained chef wrote for American home kitchens at the turn of the century: French method, French vocabulary left largely untranslated – sautoire – and a shellfish that was cheap and abundant on both American coasts. Crab in pastry shells, or in the closely related deviled and creamed forms, was a staple of ladies' luncheons and club menus of the period, and the egg-yolk-and-cream finish is the standard liaison of nineteenth-century French sauce work, used here to give body and richness without a heavier flour sauce. The half gill of sherry is worth noting for date: the recipe was written fourteen years before Prohibition.