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Soft Shell Crabs Fried with Bacon
Remove the spongy parts under the side points and pull off the aprons from twelve fresh soft shell crabs. Season with a teaspoon salt and half a teaspoon pepper, lightly baste with milk, then roll in flour, drop in boiling fat and fry for six minutes. Lift up with a wire skimmer, drain on a cloth, dress on six freshly prepared pieces of toast, arrange six thin slices freshly boiled bacon on top of crabs, decorate with six quarters lemon and parsley greens and serve.
A straightforward fry that depends almost entirely on the freshness of the crabs and on not overcooking them. Two adjustments do most of the work: shorten the frying time and treat the bacon as a garnish you crisp yourself.
- Buy them aliveSoft shell crabs spoil very quickly once dead, and the flesh turns mushy. Buy them live and kicking, or cleaned to order at the counter that same day.
- What to removeThe "spongy parts under the side points" are the gills, reached by lifting each pointed shell flap. Also snip off the face just behind the eyes and pull off the apron on the underside, as directed. Everything else is eaten, shell and all.
- Six minutes is too longA modern soft shell of 3 to 4 ounces needs about 2 to 3 minutes a side at 350-360F, until the shell is red-gold and crisp. Six minutes dries the body meat and toughens the legs; larger "jumbo" or "whale" grades may take a minute longer.
- Boiling fatThis means deep fat at frying heat, probably lard or drippings, though the recipe does not say. Use a neutral oil at 350-360F, at least two inches deep, and fry in batches of three or four so the temperature does not crash.
- SpatterCrabs hold water under the shell and will pop in hot fat. Press them dry with a cloth before the milk dip, dredge in flour, shake off the excess, and lower them in shell-side down with a screen or lid to hand.
- Freshly boiled baconThe recipe calls for the bacon to be boiled first, which would draw out salt from a heavily cured side. Ordinary modern bacon is far less salty; simply fry or bake the slices crisp and lay them over the crabs.
- YieldTwelve crabs on six pieces of toast serves six as a main course, two crabs each. Lemon is not optional here; the acid cuts the fried fat and the bacon.
Soft shell crabs are blue crabs (Callinectes sapidus) taken in the few hours after they molt, before the new shell hardens, and the trade in them grew up around the Chesapeake Bay, where watermen held "peelers" in floats and pulled them the moment they shed. Rail refrigeration in the later nineteenth century helped put them on restaurant menus well inland, and they appear here alongside dishes drawn from many other kitchens. The pairing with bacon and toast looks like a hotel dining-room convention of the period rather than a Chesapeake one: the toast catches the fat, the bacon supplies salt, and lemon quarters and parsley sprigs were a common garnish for fried dishes in American dining rooms around 1900.