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Stewed Crabs, Creole
Prepare a Creole sauce and keep hot. Place one and a half pounds very fresh crab meat in a frying pan with two tablespoons sherry and half ounce butter. Season with a teaspoon salt, a saltspoon each cayenne pepper and grated nutmeg. Lightly mix and cook for five minutes. Pour the Creole sauce over the crab meat, mix a little and let gently boil for ten minutes, dress on a deep dish and serve.
A short assembly recipe that assumes you have already made the Creole sauce called for elsewhere in the book — a cooked tomato, onion, sweet pepper and garlic sauce, roughly a pint of it for this quantity of crab.
- The hinge: stop cooking the crabCrab meat sold today is already cooked, whether fresh-picked or pasteurized. Fifteen minutes total, as written, turns it stringy and washes the flavour into the sauce. Warm the crab in the butter and sherry for a minute, fold in hot sauce, and heat through for two or three minutes only.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon. Both the cayenne and the nutmeg are meant to be background notes, not the dominant flavour.
- SaltA full teaspoon is too much for most modern crab, which is packed in brine or lightly salted, and for a Creole sauce that has already been seasoned. Season at the end, after the sauce is in.
- Half ounce butterOne tablespoon.
- Choosing crab"Very fresh crab meat" meant freshly hand-picked. Refrigerated pasteurized lump or backfin is the practical equivalent; drain it and pick through for shell and cartilage. Claw meat has more flavour and stands up better to the sauce, but shreds more easily.
- Handling"Lightly mix" is doing real work in this recipe. Fold with a spatula rather than stirring, or the lumps break down and you lose the texture you paid for.
- Yield and servingA pound and a half of crab with the sauce serves four generously as a main course, six as a first course. The "deep dish" is simply a serving bowl that will hold the sauce.
Creole cooking of New Orleans reached national cookbooks largely through the city's restaurant trade, and this recipe carries the marks of a professional kitchen: a mother sauce made in quantity and held hot, then combined to order with whatever protein the day brought in. The blue crab of Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf was cheap and abundant, and picked crab meat was a staple of the French Market. The sherry and grated nutmeg are arguably older habits than the tomato — both are generally said to have been standard in English and French seafood cookery before tomatoes entered the Louisiana repertoire, and they may survive here as a seasoning reflex rather than a Creole signature. Filippini's book places the dish among other regional specialties, which suggests that Creole cooking was already understood as something a well-travelled cook ought to be able to reproduce away from Louisiana.