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Soft Shell Crabs, Creole
Prepare and keep hot a Creole sauce. Remove the spongy part underneath the side points, tear off the aprons and thoroughly wash and wipe twelve fresh soft shell crabs. Season with a teaspoon salt, half a teaspoon paprika, lightly baste them with cold milk and lightly roll in flour. Heat two tablespoons oil in a frying pan, arrange the crabs in the pan one beside another, and nicely fry for four minutes on each side. Dress on a hot dish, pour the Creole sauce over and serve.
A straightforward pan-fry that assumes you already have a Creole sauce on the stove and a fishmonger who will hand you live crabs. Two details in the original need adjusting: the fat is under-measured and the crabs must be cleaned and cooked the same day.
- Make the sauce firstThe recipe opens with "prepare and keep hot a Creole sauce", which presumably points to a Creole sauce recipe elsewhere in the book: broadly onion, green pepper, garlic and tomato stewed down, sometimes with a little stock and bay. Have it finished and warm before the crabs hit the pan, since they take eight minutes total and will not wait.
- Buy them aliveSoft shells are blue crabs caught just after moulting, and they deteriorate fast once killed. Buy them live and kicking, or already cleaned that morning and kept on ice, and cook them the same day. Frozen soft shells work but release more water in the pan.
- Cleaning, in modern termsThe "spongy part underneath the side points" is the gills, reached by lifting each pointed end of the top shell. The "apron" is the flap folded under the belly. Also snip off the face just behind the eyes. Most fishmongers will do all three on request.
- Use more fatTwo tablespoons of oil will not fry twelve crabs; it barely coats a pan for two. Work in batches of three or four with enough oil to cover the pan bottom generously, replenishing between batches. Crowding steams the crabs instead of crisping them.
- The milk and flour"Baste with cold milk" means moisten, not soak: a light brush or dip so the flour has something to cling to. Dredge just before the crab goes into the pan, or the coating turns to paste.
- They spatterSoft shells hold water and pop audibly in hot fat. A splatter screen is worth having, and dry the crabs thoroughly with paper towels after washing, as the original's "wipe" instructs.
- TimingFour minutes a side over medium-high heat is right for a medium crab and produces a crisp shell with set, opaque meat. Larger jumbos may want an extra minute; anything longer and the body meat dries out.
- YieldTwelve crabs serves six as a main course at two apiece, or twelve as a first course. Sauce over the top, as directed, softens the crust, so some cooks pool the sauce on the plate and set the crabs on it instead.
Soft shell crabs are blue crabs, Callinectes sapidus, taken in the few hours after they shed their old shell and before the new one hardens, a window that made them a seasonal luxury of the Chesapeake and the Gulf from late spring onward. Serving them under a Creole sauce places the dish squarely in New Orleans, where the tomato-pepper-onion base known as Creole sauce was the standard dressing for local fish and shellfish. The recipe's presence reflects how thoroughly Creole cuisine had been absorbed into the repertoire of American hotel and restaurant kitchens by the turn of the twentieth century, by which time refrigerated and iced rail transport was already carrying Gulf and Chesapeake seafood well inland.