Dressed Crab
1 good sized heavy crab 6 tablespoonfuls Crisco 2 tablespoonfuls breadcrumbs 3 tablespoonfuls olive oil 2 tablespoonfuls vinegar 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley Crisp lettuce leaves Salt and pepper to taste If possible choose a crab with large claws. Boil crab in boiling salted water for thirty minutes, take up and break off large and small claws. Lay crab on its back, pull back the flap under its body, pull it right out and commence to remove flesh from shell. Take care that the little bag near head, usually full of sand, is taken out. Throw away all bone and finny pieces. The flesh is of two kinds, some firm and white, rest soft and dark. Separate former into little shreds with a fork, also the white meat from claws, which must be cracked in order to obtain it. Mix dark soft substance with crumbs, add oil, vinegar, and seasonings to taste. Toss Fish shredded white meat also in a little seasoning, but keep the two kinds separate. When shell is empty wash and dry well. Fill shell with the two mixtures, arranging them alternately, so that they appear_in dark
An English-style dressed crab dropped into an American shortening pamphlet, with the text cut off mid-sentence and a Crisco quantity the method never uses. Read it as a technique for picking and re-filling a crab rather than a fixed formula.
- The missing CriscoSix tablespoonfuls are listed and never called for; the instructions use olive oil, vinegar and crumbs only. Some English dressings of the sort bind the dark meat with a softened fat as well as crumbs, but the page as printed does not say so. Treat the Crisco as optional and add it, softened, to the brown-meat mixture only if you want a firmer paste.
- Choose a heavy crab"Heavy" is the whole test: a crab that feels dense for its size is full-meated, a light one has recently moulted and is watery. One good-sized crab of about 2 lb dresses enough for two as a starter.
- Thirty minutes is for a large crabThat timing suits a 2 lb-plus crab. Smaller ones need proportionally less — roughly 15 minutes for 1 lb, 20 for 1 1/2 lb — or the white meat turns fibrous. Salt the water heavily, near seawater strength.
- The "little bag near head"This is the stomach sac, just behind the mouthparts; lift it out whole with the mouthparts attached so it does not burst. The "finny pieces" are the grey feathered gills, sometimes called dead man's fingers — inedible in texture rather than poisonous, but discard them all.
- Brown meat and white meatThe soft dark substance is largely the hepatopancreas (with roe in a hen crab) and carries much of the flavour; the crumbs are there to absorb its looseness. Mix and season it separately, as directed, and keep the white meat in loose shreds — over-mashing white crabmeat ruins it.
- Cleaning the shellSnap away the thin brittle edge of the shell along the visible line before washing, so the cavity is even and the rim clean. Scrub, scald and dry it thoroughly; a wet shell weeps into the filling.
- Dressing balanceThree tablespoons oil to two of vinegar is sharper than most modern palates want with crab. Taste as you go and hold back vinegar rather than adding it all at once.
- ServingArrange the two mixtures in alternating bands, brown against white, scatter the parsley, and set the shell on crisp lettuce. Serve cold, the same day it is cooked, with brown bread and butter.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was a promotional cookbook issued by Procter & Gamble two years after Crisco — hydrogenated cottonseed oil — went on sale, and its business was to show the new fat doing everything butter, lard and suet had done. That mission explains the odd shape of this page: dressed crab is a British seaside dish, essentially a cold salad served back in its own shell, and it has no real need of shortening at all. The recipe reads as though it were adapted from an English source with a Crisco quantity added at the top of the ingredient list and never worked into the method. Dressing a crab in its shell is old practice in the crab ports of southern England and was well established in nineteenth-century household cookery; the division of the meat into firm white and soft brown, dressed separately and laid in stripes, is the traditional presentation and has changed very little since.