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Crab-Meat, Poulette
Heat one and a half tablespoons butter in a saucepan, add six finely chopped shallots and gently brown for ten minutes; add two light tablespoons flour, mix a little, then pour in one gill white broth, one gill each milk and cream, half teaspoon salt, saltspoon cayenne pepper and saltspoon grated nutmeg; mix with a wooden spoon until it comes to a boil, then let reduce for ten minutes. Add one and a half pounds very fresh crab meat, flake with two tablespoons sherry, lightly mix and let gently cook for ten minutes longer. Dilute an egg yolk with a tablespoon cream and add to the crab meat, mix while heating for one minute, pour into a hot tureen and serve.
A classic sauce poulette — a white roux sauce finished with an egg-yolk liaison — used here as a vehicle for picked crab. The measurements translate cleanly; the timings do not.
- The hinge: the yolk must not boilOnce the diluted yolk goes in, the sauce cannot return to a simmer or it will curdle into grains. Pull the pan to a cool burner, stir the yolk in off the heat, then warm it back just until it thickens — a minute at most, as written.
- A gill is half a cupSo the sauce base is 1/2 cup broth, 1/2 cup milk and 1/2 cup cream: a cup and a half of liquid in all, reduced for ten minutes. A saltspoon is roughly 1/4 teaspoon, which is a lot of cayenne and nutmeg for a cup and a half of liquid; start with an eighth of each and adjust.
- White brothA light, unbrowned veal or chicken stock. Any unsalted low-colour chicken stock does the job; avoid dark or heavily reduced stock, which muddies the sauce's colour and defeats the point of the name.
- "Gently brown" the shallotsTake this as sweating rather than colouring. Six shallots in a tablespoon and a half of butter over low heat for ten minutes should go soft and translucent; browning them will speck a sauce meant to stay pale.
- Ten minutes is too long for crabCooked crab meat needs only to be heated through — two or three minutes folded into the hot sauce. Ten minutes of simmering shreds the lumps and squeezes out moisture, thinning the sauce and toughening the meat.
- "Flake with two tablespoons sherry"Probably means to moisten and loosen the picked meat with the sherry before it goes in, so the flakes separate rather than clumping, though the phrasing is not wholly clear. Use a dry sherry, not cream sherry.
- Crab to buyA pound and a half of picked meat is a substantial quantity; lump or backfin blue crab suits it best. Pasteurised tub crab works, though it wants draining well or the sauce will loosen.
- Yield and servingServes four to six as a first course from a tureen, or four over toast points, rice or in pastry shells. It does not reheat — the yolk breaks on a second boil.
Poulette is one of the small named daughters of French white sauce: a velouté loosened with cream and bound at the last moment with egg yolk, usually sharpened with lemon and traditionally served with mussels, tripe, veal feet or mushrooms. The name is generally traced to the pale yellow the yolk gives the finished sauce rather than to any chicken in the dish. Applying it to American crab is exactly the kind of transplant The International Cook Book traded in — Alexander Filippini and his contemporaries worked in New York restaurant kitchens where the technique was French by training and the raw material came off local boats, and a Chesapeake crab dressed in a Parisian sauce would have read as sophisticated rather than incongruous. The egg-yolk liaison itself is older than the roux fashion that surrounds it, and remains the fussiest survival in the recipe: it is the step that separates a cook who watches the pan from one who does not.