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Soft Shell Crabs, Meuniere
Remove the spongy parts underneath the side points and the aprons from twelve fresh soft shell crabs, thoroughly wash and drain, season all around with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper, lightly baste with a little cold milk, and roll in flour gently. Heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a frying pan, arrange crabs in pan one beside another, and briskly fry four minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a hot dish, one overlapping another, sprinkle half a teaspoon freshly chopped parsley and squeeze the juice of half a sound lemon over. Drain the butter from pan in which crabs were cooked, add a half ounce butter, toss well on fire till of a light brown, pour over crabs and serve.
A clean, classic treatment that depends almost entirely on the pan being hot and the crabs being dry. Two details in the original will trip up a modern cook: the butter quantities are far too small, and "baste with milk" does not mean what it sounds like.
- The hinge: a dry, floured crab in hot fatSoft shells hold a great deal of water and will steam rather than brown if crowded or wet. Drain them well, flour immediately before frying, and cook in two batches rather than pressing twelve into one pan.
- "Baste with a little cold milk"This means moisten the surface so the flour adheres — dip or brush the crabs, do not pour milk over them. Anything more and the coating turns to paste.
- The butter is under-measuredA tablespoon and a half will not fry twelve crabs. Reckon on 3–4 tablespoons per batch, and use clarified butter or half butter and half oil, since whole butter at frying heat browns and burns before the crabs are done.
- The finishing butterHalf an ounce is one tablespoon. Cooked in a wiped-out pan until it smells nutty and turns light brown, this is beurre noisette — the whole point of the meunière. It goes from hazelnut to black in seconds, so pull it off the heat early.
- CleaningThe "spongy parts underneath the side points" are the gills; the apron is the flap on the underside. Modern practice also removes the face, cutting straight across just behind the eyes. A fishmonger will do all three on request.
- TimingFour minutes a side suits mid-sized crabs; the trade grades run roughly medium (3½-4 inches point to point), hotel (4-4½), prime, jumbo. Smaller ones need three; jumbos may want five. They are done when the shell is crisp and lightly browned — soft shells tend to go soft and mushy rather than dry when overcooked.
- SourcingLive soft shells appear only during the moulting season, roughly May to September on the American Atlantic coast. Good frozen crabs, thawed and patted very dry, work; already-dead unfrozen ones do not, as they deteriorate quickly.
- SpatteringThe shells trap moisture and pop audibly in hot fat. A splatter screen and a long spatula are worth having, and turn the crabs away from you.
- YieldTwelve crabs serve four as a main course, six as a first course. Serve at once; the crispness lasts a few minutes at most.
Meunière means "miller's wife" — the sense being anything dredged in flour before it hits the butter — and by the late nineteenth century it was the standard French restaurant treatment for a fish or shellfish that could be cooked flat in a pan, sole above all. Applying it to soft shell crabs is an American adaptation: the blue crab of the Chesapeake and the Gulf coast, taken in the brief window after it has shed its old shell and before the new one hardens, can be eaten whole, which makes it behave in the pan much like a small flatfish. Filippini's International Cook Book came out of the Delmonico's tradition in New York, where French technique was routinely turned on local ingredients, and the pairing of a Parisian method with a Chesapeake crab is exactly what that kitchen was for. The soft shell trade itself depended on the crab houses of the Eastern Shore, which held moulting crabs in floats and shipped them north on ice — a business generally traced to the second half of the nineteenth century, when rail and ice together made a perishable delicacy worth catching.