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Hard Crabs Saute
Boiled hard crabs, with shells, claws, etc., removed, split in two, then sautied in a chafing dish, is considered an excellent late-supper dish by some gourmets.
Barely more than a note, this is a chafing-dish preparation for cooked crab meat, written for a reader assumed to know how to boil and pick a crab. The gaps are worth filling in.
- "Hard crabs"The distinction is from soft-shell crabs, which are the same animal caught just after moulting and eaten whole. Hard crabs are ordinary hard-shelled crabs, cooked and picked. On the Atlantic coast in this period that would most often have meant blue crab; Dungeness or any firm crab meat behaves the same way here.
- "Split in two"With shells, claws and apron removed, what remains is the cleaned body, which halves neatly down the centre and can be sautéed as two pieces per crab. If you are working from picked lump meat instead, keep the pieces as large as possible and turn them once only.
- Boiling firstLive crabs go into heavily salted boiling water for about 12 to 15 minutes for a medium blue crab, then are cooled enough to handle before cleaning. The crab is fully cooked at this stage; the sauté is for browning and flavour, not for cooking through.
- The chafing dishA chafing dish is a shallow pan over a spirit lamp, used at table. Its heat is gentle and uneven, which suits reheating but not searing. A heavy skillet gives a better result if you are not performing the dish for guests.
- The unstated fatNo fat is named; butter is the likeliest intention for a chafing-dish sauté of this kind. Two to three tablespoons for four crabs' worth of meat, kept below the point where it browns hard; a squeeze of lemon and a shake of cayenne or paprika at the end would not be out of keeping.
- TimingThis is the hinge. The crab is already cooked, so two to three minutes in hot butter is the whole of it. Longer and the meat tightens, weeps and turns stringy.
- YieldReckon on two to three blue crabs per person as a light supper dish. "Late-supper" here suggests something served after an evening out rather than a main course.
The chafing dish had a real vogue in American households around the turn of the twentieth century, and books of this period are thick with recipes for it: lobster Newburg, welsh rarebit, creamed oysters, and short entries like this one. Its appeal was social rather than culinary — the dish was cooked at the table, in the drawing room or after a party, by the host rather than the kitchen staff, which made it the fashionable vehicle for the late supper. Blue crab was cheap and abundant along the mid-Atlantic coast, and the assumption that any reader could boil and pick one without being told how says a good deal about who the book was written for.