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Crabs in New York
Fry these delicacies in butter and serve cold, with a sauce made by frying butter and flour, without coloring the latter, thinning with water and flavoring with lemon juice. This should be very cold before being poured over the crabs.
Barely more than a note, this is a sketch a cook of 1900 could fill in from habit. The gaps are quantities, the type of crab, and the fact that both crab and sauce are meant to be served thoroughly chilled.
- Which crab is meantThe recipe does not say. A crab fried whole in butter and eaten cold points to a soft-shell blue crab, cleaned and cooked shell and all; hard-shell crab meat, picked or in the shell, would not behave the way this recipe assumes.
- No quantities are givenThe original supplies none at all. For four soft-shells, figure 3 tablespoons butter for frying and, for the sauce, 2 tablespoons butter to 2 tablespoons flour thinned with about 1 cup water.
- "Without coloring the latter"This is the hinge. The roux must be cooked only until it loses its raw smell, over low heat, with no browning; a blond or brown roux gives the wrong colour and a nutty flavour that reads as scorched once the sauce is cold.
- Water, not stockThe thinning liquid is plain water, which is why the lemon matters so much. Season assertively with salt and add lemon juice to taste at the end, off the heat, since a sauce tasted hot will seem flat when chilled.
- Cool the sauce coveredA flour-thickened sauce forms a skin and stiffens as it cools. Press plastic wrap onto the surface, chill until cold, then whisk smooth and thin with a spoonful of water if it has set too thick to pour.
- Fry to done, not to colourSoft-shells need about 3 minutes a side in hot butter, until the shell turns pinkish-red and the legs are crisp. They are eaten cold here, so undercooking cannot be corrected later.
- ServingChill the fried crabs, then nap them with the cold sauce just before they go to the table; the sauce sitting on them for long softens the fried surface. Two soft-shells per person as a first course.
Soft-shell crabs are the same blue crabs of the Chesapeake and the Long Island shore, caught in the days just after they have shed their hard shells, and in the late nineteenth century they arrived in New York markets in quantity through the spring and summer moults. Fried shellfish served cold under a cold white sauce sharpened with lemon belongs to the same family as the chilled mayonnaise-and-aspic presentations that French-trained chefs in American city kitchens were then turning out.