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Luncheon Oyster Crabs
A dainty luncheon dish is thus prepared: Split dainty crackers in two, toast, butter them and send them to the table. Let the hostess warm up a pint of oyster crabs in a chafing dish with a little butter, that is, just sufficient to keep the dainties from sticking to the dish. As they simply need warming through, a low flame is all that is required. They are so delicate that even salt other than that in the butter should not be added. Serve on the toasted cracker.
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A chafing-dish dish from the era when oyster crabs arrived free inside the oysters and a hostess cooked at the table. The whole technique is one minute of butter and restraint.
- What oyster crabs arePinnotheres ostreum, the pea-sized soft crabs that live inside living oysters. They are eaten whole, shell and all, and they were a byproduct of commercial shucking rather than a catch in their own right.
- Sourcing todayThey are almost impossible to buy. Machine shucking and volume processing removed them from the trade, and a pint represents an enormous number of oysters. If you shuck your own, save what you find; otherwise this is a reading recipe.
- A pintA pint by volume, not weight, and it is generous — roughly two cups of crabs, enough for four small servings on crackers. Half that quantity serves two.
- Chafing dishA blazer pan over a spirit lamp, usually with a hot-water jacket beneath. A small skillet over the lowest gas flame does the same job; a heavy pan holds the gentle heat better than a thin one.
- "Warming through" is understated"Warming through" is the recipe's own instruction — a low flame, butter only enough to stop sticking, and no more heat than that. Modern practice is to cook shellfish through rather than merely warm it, which here means giving the crabs a couple of minutes until they turn opaque; that is a departure from what the original asks for, and a longer cook dries them out.
- The butterThe recipe deliberately uses only enough to prevent sticking. Salted butter supplies all the seasoning the dish is meant to have; the crabs carry their own brine from the oyster.
- Dainty crackersThin water crackers or common crackers, split horizontally into two rounds, toasted cut-side up and buttered. Modern water biscuits are too thin to split; toast them whole.
- ServingSpoon on at the last second and eat immediately. Cooked crabs sitting on toast soften the cracker within a minute or two.
Oyster crabs were a genuine luxury of the American Atlantic coast in the nineteenth century, and their status came in large part from scarcity of labor as well as from the fact that only a fraction of oysters host a crab: each one had to be picked out of an oyster by hand at the shucking bench, so a modest quantity represented a great many oysters and the patience of somebody paid very little. Philadelphia and New York restaurants served them fried in deep fat or in cream, and they turn up on hotel menus of the 1880s and 1890s alongside terrapin and canvasback duck as markers of an expensive table. Their appearance here in the chafing-dish idiom is characteristic of the period around 1900, when the chafing dish became a fashionable piece of parlor equipment and cookbooks filled with dishes a hostess could finish in front of her guests ŏ quick, small, faintly theatrical, and requiring almost no cooking. Commercial shucking practice changed through the twentieth century and the crabs largely disappeared from the market, which is why a dish once merely expensive is now effectively unobtainable.