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Soft Shell Crabs Au Cerfeuil
Procure twelve very fresh, medium, soft shell crabs. Remove the spongy parts under side points, pull off the aprons, wash well in cold water and thoroughly drain on a cloth. Place on a dish, season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Pour in a gill cold milk, repeatedly turn in seasoning, then let infuse thirty minutes. Lift up and gently roll in flour. Heat two tablespoons melted butter in a frying pan, add the crabs and briskly fry three minutes on each side. Add leaves of two branches chervil, toss well. Dress on a dish, one overlapping another, pour all the contents of pan and squeeze juice of half a sound lemon over then serve.
A simple sauté that lives or dies on the freshness of the crabs and the restraint of the cooking. Two points need attention before anything else: buy the crabs live or cleaned-to-order, and do not let the chervil sit in the hot pan.
- A gill of milkA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz). It is a seasoning soak, not a batter — the crabs go into the flour damp, not dripping.
- Buy them aliveSoft shells deteriorate fast once killed. Have the fishmonger clean them in front of you and cook the same day, or buy them live and clean them yourself minutes before cooking. Frozen soft shells will work but release much more water in the pan.
- Cleaning, in fullThe "spongy parts under side points" are the gills, reached by lifting each pointed end of the top shell. Modern practice also snips off the face — eyes and mouth — a quarter inch behind the eyes, which the original leaves unsaid. The apron is the flap on the underside.
- Two tablespoons of butter is not enoughTwelve crabs will not fit in one pan, and that much butter will burn before the third crab is in. Work in two or three batches with fresh butter each time, or add a little neutral oil to raise the smoke point.
- SplatterWet crabs in hot fat pop hard. Note that the recipe's draining on a cloth comes before the milk infusion, not before frying; let the excess milk run off as you roll the crabs in flour, and keep a spatter screen to hand.
- Three minutes a sideAccurate for medium crabs (roughly 4 inches point to point) in a properly hot pan. They are done when the shell has turned reddish and the legs are crisp; longer and the body goes flabby and leaks.
- ChervilAu cerfeuil means simply "with chervil." Two branches gives perhaps a tablespoon or so of leaves. It is delicate and loses its faint anise scent quickly under heat, so add it off the flame or at the very last toss. Flat-leaf parsley with a pinch of tarragon is a common substitute if chervil is unavailable.
- YieldTwelve crabs serves four as a main course, six as a first course.
Soft shell crabs are blue crabs (Callinectes sapidus) taken in the hours after they moult, before the new shell hardens — a seasonal Atlantic and Gulf specialty that runs from late spring through summer. The treatment here is thoroughly French: a brief sauté in butter, fines-herbes seasoning, a squeeze of lemon, and the pan juices poured over. Chervil was a standard herb in professional kitchens of the period; it has largely fallen out of American groceries since, which is why parsley now stands in for it. Alexander Filippini, who compiled The International Cook Book, spent much of his career at Delmonico's in New York, where soft shell crabs were a summer fixture and where a dish could be given a French name and an American ingredient without anyone thinking it strange.