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Soft Shell Crabs, Olympia
Remove spongy parts and aprons from twelve medium, fresh soft shell crabs. Wash, thoroughly drain on a cloth and place in a deep dish. Cover with cold milk, then let infuse thirty minutes. Drain well, place six fresh slices of toast at bottom of a baking dish and arrange crabs on top of the toast. Season with half teaspoon salt and half teaspoon paprika, then arrange six very thin slices raw lean bacon over crabs, divide in very small bits a maitre d'hotel butter over the slices of bacon. Sprinkle two tablespoons bread crumbs over all. Set in very brisk oven fifteen minutes. Remove, and send to table in same dish.
A straightforward baked soft-shell crab dish that depends on high heat and short time. The only components needing translation are the oven description and the maître d'hôtel butter the recipe assumes you already have on hand.
- The hinge: heat, then outFifteen minutes in a very hot oven is enough to cook the crabs through and crisp the bacon. Soft shells overcook fast and turn woolly; pull the dish as soon as the shells are red and the bacon has rendered.
- "Very brisk oven"The hottest a period range would readily give, somewhere in the region of 450F; the term is imprecise and no exact equivalent can be fixed. Much lower and the bacon will still be flabby and the crumbs pale by the time the crabs are done.
- Maître d'hôtel butterNot a purchased product but a standard kitchen preparation: softened butter creamed with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, then chilled. Roughly 4 tablespoons butter to a tablespoon of parsley and a teaspoon of juice will cover twelve crabs.
- Cleaning the crabs"Spongy parts" are the gills under the pointed sides of the shell; the "apron" is the flap on the underside. The face and eyes are usually trimmed too. A fishmonger will do all of this if asked, but only cook crabs cleaned the same day.
- The milk soakThirty minutes in cold milk is a common period treatment for soft shells; what it actually contributes is debatable, and it can be skipped without much loss. Do not extend it, and discard the milk.
- Bacon"Raw lean bacon" simply means uncooked bacon, sliced thin and on the lean side. Modern supermarket bacon is often cut thicker; slice it thin or use pancetta so it crisps in the same fifteen minutes.
- The toastThe bread under the crabs is there to absorb butter and crab liquor, so cut it thick and toast it dry rather than buttering it. Six slices to twelve crabs works out at two crabs a slice, though the recipe does not state portions.
- YieldSix slices of toast to twelve crabs suggests six servings, though the recipe does not say so. It scales cleanly as long as the crabs sit in a single layer with a little space between them.
Soft-shell crabs are blue crabs taken in the brief window after moulting, when the new shell is still papery and the whole animal can be eaten; the season on the American Atlantic and Gulf coasts runs roughly from late spring through summer, and before refrigerated shipping the dish belonged strictly to the coast. Filippini's International Cook Book, drawn from his years at Delmonico's in New York, is full of dishes tagged with place names in this way. What "Olympia" refers to here is not recorded; a nod to Olympia, Washington, and its tiny native oyster is one guess among several, and nothing in the recipe supports it. The treatment -- bacon, maitre d'hotel butter, crumbs and a slice of toast to catch the juices -- is standard late-nineteenth-century restaurant grammar applied to whatever shellfish came in that morning.