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Soft Shell Crabs in Cream
Pick out the spongy parts underneath side points and remove aprons from twelve very fresh soft shell crabs, wash and thoroughly drain on a cloth. Heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a frying pan, arrange crabs in pan one beside another, briskly fry for three minutes on each side, lift up and keep on a plate till required. Add two tablespoons flour to same pan and briskly whisk while heating for half minute, then pour in one gill milk, one gill cream, two tablespoons sherry, half teaspoon salt, one saltspoon grated nutmeg and sharply mix with whisk until it comes to a boil. Add crabs and gently cook for eight minutes, shuffling pan once in a while, pour in a chafing dish or soup tureen and serve.
A straightforward pan-fry finished in a sherry cream sauce. The main thing to fix is the timing: the crabs are cooked twice, and the second cooking is far too long.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup, so the sauce takes 1/2 cup milk and 1/2 cup cream. A saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, which is a heavy hand with nutmeg for the roughly one cup of finished sauce this makes.
- Cut the second cookingSix minutes in the pan already cooks a soft shell through. Returning them to the sauce for eight more minutes turns the bodies mushy and the legs to threads. Two to three minutes in the finished sauce, just to heat through and pick up flavour, is enough.
- Cleaning"Spongy parts underneath side points" are the gills under the pointed edges of the shell; the "apron" is the flap on the belly. Also snip off the face just behind the eyes. A fishmonger will do all three, but only buy crabs that are alive or were cleaned within hours.
- More butter than statedA tablespoon and a half will not fry twelve crabs, and it will not carry two tablespoons of flour afterwards. Use three to four tablespoons, frying in two batches in a wide skillet so the crabs are not crowded.
- The rouxTwo tablespoons flour to one cup of liquid gives a thick, coating sauce. If you want it looser, add a splash more milk after it boils. Whisk the flour into the butter and crab fond for a full half minute before any liquid goes in, or the sauce tastes pasty.
- SherryUse a dry amontillado or fino, not cream sherry. It goes in with the dairy here rather than being reduced first, so anything sweet will read as sugary against the nutmeg.
- YieldTwelve crabs serves four as a main course or six as a first course. Serve immediately; the sauce skins over and the crabs soften as they sit, so the chafing dish should be warm and the diners seated.
Soft shell crabs are blue crabs (Callinectes sapidus) taken in the few hours after they moult, when the new shell is still papery and the whole animal can be eaten. The commercial trade grew up around the Chesapeake in the second half of the nineteenth century, when shedding floats let watermen hold peelers until they moulted and ice and rail let them reach New York and Philadelphia restaurants in edible condition. Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's, gives a treatment here that is a Franco-American one: fry in butter, build the sauce in the same pan, finish with cream, sherry and nutmeg in the manner of a béchamel. The chafing dish at the end places it firmly in the period's supper-and-late-evening repertoire, where a covered dish of something rich in cream seems to have been a familiar form.