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Eggs Cocotte with Oyster Crabs
Thoroughly wash and drain on a cloth a half pint fresh oyster crabs. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in a frying pan, add crabs and fry for five minutes, briskly tossing them meanwhile. Pour in two tablespoons sherry and one and a half gills cream, season with three saltspoons salt, saltspoon grated nutmeg, and boil for five minutes. Evenly divide crabs in six cocotte dishes, carefully crack two fresh eggs in each dish, season with a half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper, equally divided, then set in oven for five minutes, remove and serve.
A Delmonico's-style egg dish that depends on an ingredient almost no one can buy now, and on oven timing the original leaves entirely to the cook's judgment. The hinge is the eggs: five minutes will not set them in a cold dish.
- Oyster crabsThese are Pinnotheres ostreum, the pea-sized commensal crabs that live inside live oysters, eaten whole and soft-shelled. They are effectively unobtainable outside a few oyster houses; small peeled bay shrimp or cooked crawfish tails give the same scale and sweetness, though not the same faintly briny crunch.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so a gill and a half of cream is 3/4 cup. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon: three saltspoons of salt is 3/4 teaspoon, and two saltspoons of pepper is 1/2 teaspoon divided across six dishes.
- Half a pint of crabsThis is a volume measure of whole crabs, roughly one cup, which works out to something like 4 to 5 ounces by weight. Treat it as approximate.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A moderate oven, 350F, is the sensible reading, and cocottes of this kind are conventionally set in a bain-marie of hot water reaching halfway up the dishes so the whites set before the bottoms toughen.
- The five-minute eggsFive minutes is optimistic for twelve eggs, though the boiling cream and crabs go into the dishes first and will have warmed them. Expect nearer 8 to 12 minutes in a hot water bath at 350F, pulled when the whites are just opaque and the yolks still fluid, with carryover finishing them. If you want the yolks firm, go longer and accept a firmer white.
- Cooking the crabs and creamFive minutes of brisk tossing overcooks small shellfish; two to three minutes is enough to firm them. The five-minute boil is really there to reduce the cream and burn off the sherry's rawness, so watch for a sauce that coats rather than the clock.
- SeasoningReduced cream concentrates salt, and 3/4 teaspoon in the sauce plus another 1/2 teaspoon over the eggs is on the generous side by modern palates. Salt the sauce, then season the eggs lightly at the table.
- YieldSix cocottes of two eggs each, intended as a first course or a lunch dish rather than a main.
The International Cook Book is the work of Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this dish carries the mark of that kitchen: a French service format, eggs en cocotte baked in individual dishes, filled with a distinctly American luxury. Oyster crabs were prized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries precisely because they were a by-product of hand-shucking, picked one at a time from the gills of oysters, so a portion represented a great many oysters opened. They appear in the fashionable menus of the period fried in deep fat, in cream, or folded into eggs and terrapin. Their near-disappearance from restaurant cooking is generally traced to mechanised shucking and the decline of the Atlantic oyster beds rather than to any change in taste, and the recipe survives now mostly as a record of what an expensive plate of eggs looked like in 1906.