Deviled Crab

Crab-cakes may be king now, but it wasn’t always so. From the 1800′s right on up through the 1950′s, if you wanted to impress some guests, you’d serve them crab meat picked from the crab, mixed with an assortment of seasonings, packed back into the crab shell with some breadcrumbs on top and baked until golden brown. Très Élégante!

Not to be confused with the Southern dish of the same name, “Deviled Crab” is essentially crab salad or crab imperial, broiled in a crab shell. Some recipes, such as those from “Mrs. Kitching’s Smith Island Cookbook” (1981) and the Baltimore Evening Sun’s “Fun with Sea Food” (1960) just refer to this dish as Crab Imperial. With those recipes included, the Deviled Crabs recipes in my database out-number the crab cake recipes.

Whereas crab-cake formulas are all but set in stone these days (”NO FILLER YE INFIDELS!”), Deviled Crab is a nice alternative that allows a little leeway. Recipes from the late 1800′s books “Queen of the Kitchen” and “Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen” simply place the picked crab meat in the shell, top it with breadcrumbs and butter, and broil. 

Later recipes stuff the crab shells with a salad containing a variety of ingredients. Most contain some combination of breadcrumbs, egg, milk or cream, pepper, Worcestershire, mustard, parsley, mayonnaise and lemon juice. Other optional add-ins include onion, mushroom, green pepper, horseradish, sherry and Tabasco sauce.

I didn’t have all of the ingredients to make any one particular recipe, so I just winged it. The results were actually pretty fantastic… better than many crab-cakes I’ve had. Tasters attributed the success primarily to the flavorful shallot, and the fact that the crab meat was a combination from the entire crab. Such features included in a crab-cake recipe would have me pilloried. 

Recipe:

(things I had around)

• ½ lb crabmeat
• ½ cup breadcrumbs
• 1 shallot, minced fine
• ½ cup mayonnaise
• juice of 1 lemon
• ½ tsp Worcestershire Soy Sauce
• ½ tsp mustard powder
• dash hot sauce
• salt, pepper
• topping: breadcrumbs, butter, paprika

Pick meat from crabs & clean shells thoroughly, if using. Mix mayo with shallot and seasonings and gently fold in crabmeat. Gently drop into crab shells or ramekins. Top with breadcrumbs, dot with butter, sprinkle with paprika. Cook for 15 minutes at 375° or until topping is browned.