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Crabs and Tomatoes
(Provence.) Boil enough crabs and chop fine; to each pound add 1/3 as much bread-crumbs, 1/2 pint of tomato sauce, rind and juice of 1/2 a lemon, salt, pepper, parsley, and 1 glass of Chablis or sherry. Stir well and serve hot, with a border of toast or fried potatoes.
A terse Provençal formula that assumes you already have picked crabmeat, a pan of tomato sauce and a sense of proportion. The quantities are given by weight of crab, so it scales cleanly once you fix the base.
- Start from picked meat"To each pound" is best read as a pound of cooked, picked crabmeat, since the crabs are boiled and chopped first; the recipe does not say so outright. Whole crabs yield only a fraction of their weight in meat, so several pounds of crab go to a pound of picked meat, and a pound of good lump crab from the fish counter does the same job.
- The measurements in modern termsA third as much breadcrumbs is about 5-6 oz by weight, or roughly 1 1/3 to 1 1/2 cups of dry crumbs. Half a pint is 1 cup in US measure (10 fl oz if the book is using imperial). A "glass" of wine in older cookbooks usually means a wineglassful, conventionally reckoned at about 2 fl oz, though the term was used loosely.
- Cook the wine down firstAdding Chablis or sherry straight into the pan at the end leaves the dish thin and raw-tasting. Reduce the wine with the tomato sauce for a few minutes before the crab goes in.
- Crab wants two minutes, not tenThe meat is already cooked. Fold it through the hot sauce only long enough to heat it, then stop; longer and it turns stringy and weeps water into the sauce.
- Lemon rind means zestTake only the yellow, finely grated, and add it with the juice off the heat. The white pith turns bitter in a tomato base.
- Breadcrumbs are the thickenerThe recipe does not say whether the crumbs are dry or fresh; dry crumbs absorb more and are the safer choice, added gradually so the mixture stays moist and spoonable rather than stiff.
- Yield and servingA pound of crab made up this way serves four as a first course, two as a main. The "border" is a ring of toast points or fried potatoes laid round the edge of a hot platter, with the crab spooned into the middle.
The combination here -- crab, tomato, lemon, a splash of white wine, parsley -- follows the same seasoning logic as the region's fish soups and stuffed shellfish, tomato having become established in Provençal cooking over the course of the nineteenth century. The instruction to serve it with a border of toast or fried potatoes marks it as a hot entrée in the Anglo-American sense: something a cook could scale to whatever the fishmonger had and send up in a single dish. Books of this type, gathering short foreign recipes for English-speaking households, tended to compress a regional dish to its bare proportions and trust the reader with the rest, which is why the wine is "1 glass" and the crab is left to the cook to boil and pick.