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Scrambled Eggs with Crab Meat
Carefully crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add half gill cream, half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons pepper and briskly beat with fork one minute. Heat two tablespoons melted butter in a frying pan, add quarter of a pound of crab meat, season with two saltspoons salt, half saltspoon cayenne and saltspoon grated nutmeg and cook five minutes, stirring with fork meanwhile. Drop in the eggs with a tablespoon sherry and cook rather briskly six minutes, stirring briskly once in a while. Transfer to a deep dish and serve.
A straightforward eight-egg scramble enriched with crab and sherry. The only real problem is the timing: eleven minutes of total pan time will give you dry, curdled eggs unless you drop the heat well below what "rather briskly" suggests.
- Half a gill of creamA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 4 tablespoons — 1/4 cup for eight eggs. That is generous but not excessive.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the eggs get 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon pepper; the crab gets 1/2 teaspoon salt, an eighth teaspoon cayenne and a quarter teaspoon nutmeg.
- The six minutesSix minutes of brisk cooking will scramble eight eggs past the point of pleasure. Over medium-low heat, stirring more or less constantly, they will be set but still creamy in three to four minutes, and they continue to firm up in the serving dish.
- Warm the crab, don't cook itCooked crab meat needs only to be heated through — a minute or two is enough to bloom the cayenne and nutmeg in the butter. Five minutes of stirring shreds picked lump meat to threads.
- Crab to useQuarter pound of picked cooked crab, ideally lump or backfin. Drain it well; wet crab will loosen the eggs. Pasteurized tub crab works and needs no additional cooking.
- The sherryAdd the tablespoon of sherry to the crab and let it cook off for a few seconds before the eggs go in, so the alcohol evaporates rather than thinning the curd. A dry or medium sherry, not cream sherry.
- Butter"Two tablespoons melted butter" simply means melt it in the pan. In a well-seasoned or nonstick pan you can use less.
- YieldServes four as a lunch or supper dish, three at breakfast. Serve at once; eggs of this richness suffer badly from holding.
Crab and eggs together turn up across the late-Victorian and Edwardian repertoire on both sides of the Atlantic, often as a chafing-dish or breakfast dish. The seasoning here, cayenne with grated nutmeg and a spoonful of sherry, is a familiar American shellfish combination of the period, close to what flavors deviled crab and Newburg-style sauces; nutmeg on seafood reads as odd now but was unremarkable then. The International Cook Book is credited to Alexander Filippini, formerly of Delmonico's in New York, and the terse, numbered-measure style of this entry, saltspoons and gills included, is characteristic of a professional writing down restaurant practice for domestic readers.