The Crabmeat.Commercially picked blue crabmeat is sold by the grade, the most expensive of which is “lump”—big pieces from the back fin—and the least expensive “special” or “regular”—a mass of tiny meat slivers picked from the body. It’s no strain on the brain to guess the grade most likely to end up in crab cakes—which is fine, but it does pose a problem for the cook. The finer the bits of crabmeat, the drier it is, so a way must be found to add moisture back. But because Maine crab has nothing much in the way of lump meat, pickers almost always give you a mix of claw and body meat, which is usually quite moist. Your crab cake strategy should be based on whether your crabmeat is chunky and moist or fibrous and dry. Or, if you have no trustworthy access to crabmeat at all, consider substituting either salmon or one of the tender, easily flaked, white-fleshed tribe of cod. Gently poach it until just done, flake it, and proceed from there, using a little of the poaching liquid to moisten it. Although hard to find even in Maine these days, a good cod cake can make for a memorable repast.
The Binder.Those who claim that the truly authentic binder of crab cakes is a handful of crushed Saltines are mostly boasting that they have a friend in the crab-picking business and get to make their crab cakes from big, flavorful chunks of meat. The dry Saltines soak up the crab juices and keep the crab cakes from losing moisture and flavor. However, as noted above, those faced with a container of crab shavings have to find some way to remoisten the meat—usually in the form of milk-sopped bread bits (i.e., the next size up from crumbs).
In either instance, the amount should be minimal: a couple of crackers or a slice or so of bread torn to bits and lightly moistened with milk or cream. Mrs. Seymour finds this sufficient as a binder and adds no mayonnaise, but most everyone else uses both, plus, in many instances, a raw beaten egg. If, on the other hand, using none of the above seems the most inviting option, consider the recipe for Crab Norfolk, on page 162: it’s at once simple and over-the-top.
The Seasonings.In your basic, no-frills crab joint, these are usually a tablespoon of prepared mustard and half a teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce, with perhaps some minced parsley for color. (Those who no longer deign to keep Worcestershire sauce in their larder substitute a high-toned vinegar or fresh lemon juice.) Mrs. Seymour adds a tablespoon of grated onion to this list and specifies Gulden’s spicy brown mustard. Tabasco sauce and—less often—grated horseradish are also used. Recently, Old Bay Seasoning has been appearing in Maryland crab cake recipes to give them the stamp of “authenticity”—but in my opinion, that stuff has too many ingredients to belong in a crab cake. Better to season the crab cake lightly and add the appropriate zip via some homemade tartar sauce.
PIGEON HILL BAY CRAB CAKES
[makes 8 cakes to serve up to 4]
Pigeon Hill Bay comes to an end in a small cove a little more than a stone’s throw from our house. Along its shores we saw seals basking, bald eagles fishing, and humans engaged in any number of tasks—clamming, catching elvers, digging for bloodworms to sell as bait. Crabs aplenty were to be found there, too, and not a few of them ended up in the following recipe.
1 pound crabmeat, checked for shell fragments
2 or 3 Saltine crackers, crumbled in the fist
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
generous dash Tabasco sauce
½ teaspoon spicy brown mustard
1 tablespoon minced parsley
¼ teaspoon salt
freshly ground black pepper to taste
3 to 4 tablespoons butter for frying
Put the picked-over crabmeat in a mixing bowl and crumble the Saltine crackers into it. Blend the mayonnaise, Tabasco sauce, mustard, and parsley together, turn into the crabmeat mixture, and sprinkle this with the salt and black pepper. Using your fingers or a rubber spatula, gently toss to produce a loosely textured crab salad.
Take a biscuit cutter or a small, clean topless-and-bottomless can about 2½ inches in diameter and set it on a large plate. Spoon approximately one-eighth of the crab mixture into the ring, tapping the ring gently when full to settle it. Then remove the ring, set it elsewhere on the plate, and repeat the above process, continuing until you have formed 8 crab cakes. Put the plate in the refrigerator and let the crab cakes firm for 1 to 2 hours.
Meanwhile, to prevent burning the cakes, put the butter in a heat-proof measuring cup and place it in an oven turned to its lowest setting. After 15 minutes—or when the butter has turned clear and the butter solids have settled to the bottom of the cup—using an oven mitt or a pot holder, carefully pour the liquid butter onto a griddle or large skillet, leaving behind—and then discarding—all of the butter solids.
When it is time to cook the crab cakes, remove the plate from the refrigerator. Heat the clarified butter in the griddle over medium-high heat. When the butter is hot, slide a thin-edged spatula under each crab cake and, with a gentle shake, slip it onto the hot griddle. Fry the cakes until the bottoms are golden brown, about 2 minutes, then turn them over to cook on the other side. Serve at once with coleslaw and potato salad or a dressed green salad and hot boiled rice, and pass the tartar sauce.
TARTAR SAUCE
As ketchup is to French fries, so tartar sauce is to crab cakes.
— John Shields,The Chesapeake Bay Crab Cookbook
One more way to divide the world is into those who put tartar sauce on their fried fish and those who squeeze lemon over it. (There is, I know, the tiny minority who use neither and that other, perhaps not so small one, who use both.) Store-bought tartar sauce can be deliciously vulgar stuff, great with fish and chips, but crab cakes deserve something with more gumption.
Eliza Acton is said to have introduced tartar sauce to English-speaking eaters inModern Cookery (1845), and her version is not nearly as sweet and bland as ours. It is doubtful that Acton knew anything about Tartar cooking; the word was then commonly used in England to evoke their rebarbative reputation—“swear like a Tartar”—and here to signal that this sauce was pretty fierce stuff. Nor is her recipe based on mayonnaise but on a salad dressing called English sauce, made by thickening fresh cream with cooked egg yolks. This is lighter and creamier than mayonnaise, and quicker and easier to make.
ENGLISH SAUCE
[makes about ½ cup dressing]
1 large hard-boiled egg yolk
teaspoon each salt and cayenne
¼ teaspoon sugar
½ cup whipping cream
1 teaspoon lemon juice or tarragon vinegar
Put the hard-boiled yolk into a shallow soup bowl and use the tip of a rubber spatula to mash it to a lumpless paste, working in a few drops of cold water toward the end to make it as smooth as possible. Blend in the seasonings, then, bit by bit, stir in the cream. Finally, add the lemon juice or vinegar. Set in a cool place for a few hours so that the lemon juice or vinegar has time to help thicken the cream to the right consistency. Taste again for seasoning before serving. (Elizabeth David blends araw egg yolk with the hard-boiled one to make an even smoother sauce.)
Those who like creamy salad dressings will delight in the way this one accepts all sorts of flavorings. Eliza Acton herself recommends adding chopped fresh herbs, anchovy fillets, finely grated horseradish, prepared mustard, and/or minced garlic to taste when dressing salad greens or composed salads of seafood, chicken, or cooked vegetables. In making tartar sauce, she pulls out all the stops. The following recipe is taken straight from the pages of her book.
TARTAR SAUCE
Add to the above amount of English sauce a teaspoonful or more of made mustard, one of finely minced eschalots, one of parsley or tarragon, and one of capers or of pickled gherkins, with a rather high seasoning of cayenne, and some salt if needed. Good French mustard is to be preferred to English for this sauce, which is usually made very pungent, and for which any ingredients can be used to the taste which will serve to render it so. Tarragon vinegar,minced tarragon, and eschalots, and plenty of oil, are used for it in France, in conjunction with the yolks of one or two eggs, and
chopped capers, or gherkins, to which olives are sometimes added.
Of course, if you prefer, you can also make Tartar sauce with prepared mayonnaise—not as authentic as the above, but still a distinct cut above the commercial product. Into 1 cup mayonnaise blend any or all of the following: 2 tablespoons each minced raw onion and parsley, 2 or 3 minced gherkins, the juice of ½ lemon, and a few dashes of Tabasco sauce. Let this sit in the fridge for an hour for the flavors to meld, then give it a quick final stir before bringing it to table.
Further Reading
For a thoughtful, evocative essay on blue crabs and those who catch and cook them in the Chesapeake Bay, turn to Edward Behr’s essay “Maryland Crab” in the summer 1992 issue (no. 23) of his food letter,The Art of Eating (the single issue is $9.00 from Box 242; Peacham, VT 05862). Those seeking crab cake recipes will find a wealth of vernacular ones in John Shields’s excellentThe Chesapeake Bay Crab Cookbook.
A NOTE ON CRAB À LA NORFOLK
The late Augustus Kelley, whose seminal writings on chowder under the pseudonym “Theophrastus” are discussed at length inSerious Pig, occasionally wrote to us about his other favorite seafood dishes, including one for which he had never found a printed recipe.
I was in the secondhand book business for many years, specializing in the field of economics. In my day, Washington, D.C., was a terrific book town, mainly because when congressmen or senators lost their bid for reelection, they quite often sold their books to the Washington book dealers before returning home. I used to look forward to these Washington trips. There were so many good restaurants; one in particular, O’Donnell’s, in the heart of Washington, used to feature all kinds of shellfish “à la Norfolk.” Everything else there was good, but the Norfolk dishes were supreme. The waiters were terribly nice, but none would reveal the receipt. (O’Donnell’s finally moved to Bethesda, and though the food was still good when I was last there, it was not quite as good). I did a lot of searching for a Norfolk, Virginia, cookbook but never found one. I wish I had—the recipe for shellfish à la Norfolk would be a great prize.
Our curiosity piqued, we set out to find what we could about the dish. Norfolk, Virginia, is perched at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. Before World War II transformed it into the world’s largest naval base and the Atlantic headquarters of NATO, it was a quiet Southern shipping port already famous for this simple but ultrarich seafood dish. In hisNorth Atlantic Seafood (1979), Alan Davidson writes that crab or lobster
prepared Norfolk style, which is to say with nothing else but butter and seasoning, is too rich for some. I have been eating it on and off at Martin’s restaurant in the Georgetown district of Washington, D.C., for nearly thirty years, but I plan to give it up on my sixty-fifth birthday.26
We eventually found a more detailed account of “Crab Norfolk” in two cookbooks, the most recently published of which was Craig Claiborne’sSouthern Cooking (1987). It is all but identical in both its simplicity and buttery richness to one given forty years earlier in Sheila Hib-ben’sAmerican Regional Cookery (1947). Claiborne also tells us something more of its history:
Crab Norfolk is a specialty of Norfolk, Virginia, where it was first created by W. O. Snowden of the once popular, now defunct, Snowden and Mason Restaurant, which opened in that city in 1924. The dish was originally cooked in specially designed small oval aluminum pans. In some establishments in Norfolk it is still cooked and served in those pans.
Here, somewhat adapted, is his recipe.
CRAB NORFOLK
[serves 4]
1 pound lump crabmeat
cup white or cider vinegar
¼ pound (1 stick) unsalted butter
dash of Tabasco sauce
salt and black pepper to taste
Pick over the crabmeat to remove any trace of shell or cartilage. Put it into a bowl and toss it with the vinegar. Melt the butter in a skillet. When the butter is bubbling, add the Tabasco, swirl to mix, and then stir in the seasoned crabmeat. Stir the crab gently until it is heated through, being careful not to break up the larger lumps of claw meat. Lightly season with salt and black pepper to taste. Serve hot, with buttered rice on the side.
Hibben uses the juice of half a lemon instead of the vinegar, which seems a good move to us, and she heats the crabmeat in a double boiler instead of a skillet, which doesn’t. Part of the defining character of this dish is the sizzle, and it’s surprising that Claiborne doesn’t make more of this in his recipe. Consequently, I was immensely drawn to Joe Hyde’s version of the dish in hisLove, Time, & Butter (see page 226 for more about him), where panache (and timing) is everything and the ingredient list cut to the bone.
Hyde simply spreads the pound of crabmeat evenly over the bottom of a buttered baking dish and slips it into a preheated 400—F oven. Five minutes later, he melts a stick and a half of butter in a skillet over medium-high heat until it has browned and has a nutty smell—don’t let it burn. The crab is removed at the ten-minute mark, sprinkled with parsley, and rushed to the table, with the melted butter, in a small, warmed pitcher, set at its side.
RISO IN BIANCO
Anyone setting out to learn to make risotto, as I did recently, will find that the hardest part is sorting through the abundance of information and recipes. Risotto may or may not be the most famous rice dish in the world, but it is the only one I know that has had several entire books devoted to it; in fact, one food writer, Judith Barrett, has writtentwo.
However, as risotto follows risotto, the attentive reader gradually becomes aware of a strange absence lurking behind all this amplitude and begins to wonder: do Italians shun all other ways of preparing rice? As I searched through our Italian cookbook collection, I discovered that, in them at least, rice cooking and risotto making are all but synonymous. There are rice-based soups, fried rice balls, rice molds, and rice salads (new to Italian cuisine, but very popular), but you have to look long and hard for any discussion about what in other rice-centered cuisines is the focal point of most any meal, whether it be eaten by rich or poor—plain steamed or boiled rice.
Apparently, this is because the Italian way of showing respect to the central starch is to serve it separately, traditionally as the first course. Here, pasta points the way: it’s impossible to imagine a bowl of plain boiled spaghetti being set on the table, no matter what else is being served. And this is also true of rice. Consider, in this light, the recipe for “Rice As a Side Dish” in the godfather of modern Italian cookbooks, Pellegrino Artusi’s classicScience in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well (1890):
To avoid using too much broth, first blanch the rice in water, and then finish cooking it in chicken broth. Make the rice firm and when nearly done, flavor it with butter and a little Parmesan cheese. If you are using [half a pound] of rice, bind it with one egg, or better still, with two yolks as you remove it from the fire.
If you are serving the rice with a stew of milk-fed veal or veal chops, rather than with boiled chicken, in addition to the ingredients mentioned above add two or three tablespoons of spinach which you have boiled and passed through a sieve. In this way your rice will be green and have a more refined flavor.
In Italian cooking, it seems, the simplest starch dish has to restrain itself from becoming the entire meal. And with so many Italian rice dishes already heading down the road that leads to risotto, you have to admire the few plain rice dishes that have stubbornly refused to do so. The two peculiar qualities of Italian rice that make a risotto unique—the ample starch that provides its luscious creaminess and the resilient interior that resists being cooked to mush—can be utilized more simply (see Patience Gray’s recipe for “La Peperonata con Riso” on pages 175–77) or individually. For instance, a few handfuls of the rice can be used to thicken soups or cooked into a savory porridge, or a large amount can be tossed into boiling water until the starch is cooked away, leaving behind the pleasingly chewy center of the rice kernel. Suchriso al dente is treated like pasta, drained and then tossed with a small amount o
f sauce, or, even better, tossed without it, as Elizabeth David says inItalian Food:
One of the nicest ways of eating plain rice [riso in bianco] is, it cannot be denied, with plenty of grated Parmesan cheese and an unlimited quantity of good fresh country butter, and this is a dish which may be eaten to perfection in northern Italy. The rice of Piedmont is so good and so full of flavor that it is almost a pity to pour a sauce over it.
Such dishes fall under the loose rubric ofrisi in bianco. In Italian,bianco has two meanings: “white,” and “blank” or “empty.” Consequently, in culinary parlance, the termin bianco not only means “unadorned” or “served plain” but implies additionally an absence that is itself a kind of presence (as in the suggestive phrase “blank check”).
This absence can be literal—in biancois often used to indicate that tomatoes have been left out of a dish that usually includes them, not in an attempt to cheapen it but to make it into something different. However, it can also mean something a little more metaphorical, as Biba Caggiano explains inItaly al Dente:
Italians turn tomangiare in bianco when they are a bit under the weather, when they want to lighten up on their diet, or when they have partied a bit too much the night before. It is believed that a plate of pasta or rice, dressed only with a bit of fresh butter and cheese, restores body and mind. Certainly, it is a basic comfort food.
And this is exactly the case when Italians prepare “white” rice.
It was Matt who broughtriso in bianco into my life. Back in the early seventies, reading Marcella Hazan’sThe Classic Italian Cook Book, she had come across a simple version in which the boiled rice was tossed with butter, torn basil leaves, shredded mozzarella, and plenty of grated Parmesan. Unlike the many pages of risottos that had come before, this dish was something that immediately sparked her interest. In fact, it awakened a longing that wouldn’t be satisfied until she moved to New York City a few years later, where both arborio rice and fresh mozzarella were easier to come by.
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