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Oyster Crabs, Bonne Bouche
Thoroughly wash a pint very fresh oyster crabs and drain on a sieve. Place on a lighted chafing dish with a gill good sherry, half ounce good butter, a level teaspoon salt and half saltspoon paprika; lightly mix, set fire to the sherry and let burn for two minutes, continually tossing the contents meanwhile. Place the chafing dish in the oven for one minute only. Remove, spread a Bearnaise sauce to cover all the crabs, then serve without mixing. If no chafing dish at hand, use an earthen cocotte dish.
A chafing-dish flourish from the era when oyster crabs arrived free inside the oysters. The cooking is measured in seconds, and the sauce goes on at the end untouched.
- The hinge: nothing gets stirred at the endThe Bearnaise is spread over the crabs and left there, so each spoonful carries sauce and crab separately. The recipe is explicit: serve without mixing.
- Sourcing oyster crabsThese are Pinnotheres ostreum, the pea-sized commensal crabs that live inside Eastern oysters, eaten whole, shell and all. They are no longer sold commercially in any quantity; a shucking house working through bushels of wild oysters is the only realistic source, and farmed oysters rarely carry them. Very small shrimp, whole or cut small, can be substituted, though the texture is not the same.
- A pint of crabsThey are sold by dry volume, not weight. A pint would serve roughly two to four as a first course.
- Old measuresA gill is half a cup of sherry. Half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so half a saltspoon of paprika is about an eighth.
- Cut the saltA level teaspoon of salt for a pint of crabs is heavy by current taste, particularly with Bearnaise following. A generous pinch is closer to right, and can be adjusted after the alcohol burns off.
- Flambe and pan choiceThe sherry is lit and allowed to burn about two minutes while you toss constantly. Flaming burns off some of the alcohol but by no means all of it. Warm the sherry before lighting, keep the pan away from the extractor hood, and use a small heavy skillet or an ovenproof earthenware cocotte as the recipe's own alternative suggests. A modern chafing dish with plastic or wooden fittings should not go in the oven.
- One minute means one minuteThe recipe gives no oven temperature; the one-minute stage only sets the surface, so a hot oven and strict timing are what is wanted. Small crustaceans go dry and papery within a minute or two of overcooking.
- Have the Bearnaise ready firstThere is no window to make sauce once the crabs are in the pan. Hold the Bearnaise warm, near body temperature, and spoon it over the moment the pan leaves the oven.
"Bonne bouche" means simply a tasty mouthful, a morsel to finish on, and the whole conceit of the dish is scarcity: oyster crabs were a by-product that only kitchens working through large quantities of wild oysters ever accumulated in usable numbers. Soft and pale and eaten entire, they were a great favourite in nineteenth-century American restaurant cooking, most often floured and deep-fried, and their appearance here in the chafing-dish idiom, flamed in sherry and finished with Bearnaise, places the recipe squarely in the Delmonico-influenced luxury service of the period. Chafing-dish cookery was fashionable at the turn of the century precisely because it was performed at the table, which explains the theatrical instruction to set the sherry alight. The crabs themselves have not disappeared, but the shift to cultivated oysters and mechanised shucking means almost nobody collects them any more, and the dish has become one of those entries that is easier to read about than to cook.