A Terrible Discovery! - Historic Stewed Crab Dish

Welcome to 18th Century Cooking. I'm your host, John Townsend. We have a special guest in the kitchen today, Michael Dragoo, and he's brought, what dish have you brought? Stewed crabs. That looks delicious. Thank you so much, Michael. Thanks for joining us as we savor the flavors and the aromas of the 18th century. What strange variety of food in this wide world we meet. The fields, the forests, and the flood afford a bounteous treat. Nature her generous lap unfolds to those who earn their living. Old ocean not a crab withholds, to all a part is given. Today we're going to be cooking seafood, and specifically crabs. That's such an important part of the diet in the 18th century for anyone that was along the seacoast. All up and down the eastern seaboard in North America and in Great Britain, seafood and shellfish were so important to the diet of poor people and rich people alike, but actually very, very important to poor people. Today we consider seafood to be something maybe that's fairly expensive. It's in great demand, whether you are in the coast or in inland, and we tend to pay a lot of money for it. And the 18th century was so prolific on the seaboard that it tended to be food for the poor. So you will find it being sold as street food. Vendors going along the street and selling it in New York, in Philadelphia, in London, anywhere along the coast. And it's also being used for more expensive food. But generally, you'll find that it was really kind of looked down upon because poor people would eat it. There are even circumstances where people would say, oh, if there are, say, lobster shells outside someone's house, that means they're very, very poor people. We don't think about that today, do we? So we can imagine ourselves walking down the street, say, in Manhattan today, and we might stop by and get a hot dog from a hot dog vendor. But in the 18th century, it might be a vendor with oyster on the half shell and you just eat it right there. And there is more than one reference to either prisoners or indentured servants complaining about having to eat, say, lobsters more than three times a week. They would petition whoever's in charge and say, you can't feed us that more than three times a week. And so poor people, many times they felt that they were in very good circumstances if they didn't have to rely upon these inexpensive shellfish to feed themselves, get that protein each and every week. The most important part for me on these recipes is setting the context, setting the stage for what this food means in the time period and what it means to us today. I hope you enjoy this very interesting crab recipe. So today's dish, it includes crab. They eat seafood, and many times we think of seafood as fairly high-end kind of food. Sometimes it's very regional. It can be expensive. We can all get it at the grocery store, but it's all, you know, it might be frozen or an expensive fresh dish. In the 18th century, that wasn't necessarily true. No, this recipe comes from the early 1700s, and we're still pretty much living on the eastern seaboard. Shellfish is not a high-end fish, but it's an easily obtained fish. And not everyone was raising hoofed creatures, and you had to live, and you could barter if you had the wherewithal. Well, something like crabs, clams, mussels, all those things are fairly, actually they're easy to get. They're cheap food in the time period, very prolific. They had a lot of seafood in the market. So this is really kind of a, it can be a very low-end dish. Today, we don't think of it that way because it's very expensive. No, but you know, when we did that lobster recipe, we had people write in that they remembered their grandparents being ashamed, that the kids would be ashamed because they had a lobster sandwich in their lunchbox at work. It never has been a high-end until rather recently in our frame of mind. So it's much, much more expensive for us to get in the time period. Yep. This could have been a very inexpensive dish. It is. Very few ingredients, but they're ingredients that you wouldn't necessarily choose today to prepare, and I think it's going to be an interesting take on this. To Stew Crabs comes from Powell's Complete Book of Cookery, and it reads as follows. Take out the meat and cleanse it from the skins. Put it into a stew pan with a quarter of a pint of white wine, some crumbs of white bread, an anchovy, and a little nutmeg. Set them over a gentle charcoal fire with the yolk of an egg. Beat into it some pepper and stir it all together and serve it up. That's it. It's as simple as it is. What excited me about this was the cookbook itself. Powell is my wife's maiden name, and they both are from England, and we're researching that connection right now. This is a simple recipe using crab. Not everybody cooks with crab every day. It's affordable. I'm excited to try this. Let's get started. Our ingredients include an egg yolk, bread crumbs, some black pepper, a minced anchovy, and the crab. Right, and we've got some white wine. So you're going to start off with a mixture of this white wine, and you're going to bring the egg in, right? Yeah, but if I were to introduce the egg yolk into the pan, it calls for about a half a cup, and that's about a half a cup. And if I were to introduce that egg yolk as the preparation is warming, it would turn into a scrambled egg, and we don't want that. All righty, if you want to add the bread crumbs and a pinch of black pepper. So, like usual, these recipes, they don't say how much bread crumbs to put in. I think they just want a slight thickening, so we're going to go with that. You want black pepper in too now? Yes, please. Okay, here's our black pepper. I like black pepper. Oh, no, that's all right. We're going to load it up. And then, I can't come here anymore without having the nutmeg, so we've got a pinch of nutmeg. This is in the recipe, right? Yes, it is. There it is. See, we're not cheating. This has really got nutmeg in it. About a half a nutmeg? I think that's more than enough. Is that a little bit more? I'm stopping, thank you. Okay, okay. All righty, then we're just going to mix the crab in with this. Okay. I'm going to pour this in here, and we'll just mix it up. And then our last bit is just pouring it all together. So this mixture, it looks great. It looks like we can eat it right now, but obviously it needs to go on the fire, right? Gentle charcoal fire of insulin. All right, we just had this thing simmering on the fire, and we've taken it out. And it's time to give it a test drive here. Okay. I've done well over 300 cooking episodes, and I've liked almost every single one of them. Question is, is this the one that breaks the rule because it doesn't look... Might be the one. Doesn't look good. Are we together? Are we doing this together? Okay, let's go. Okay. Well. I'm not sure what's in here, Michael. No, no. Needs to be a little brighter taste. I don't know what it is. Brighter. I'd add a little salt, but it didn't call for it. Maybe another anchovy. That's where you get the saltiness. I think the anchovy's the thing that's in here that I don't like. Yeah. I don't know. You know, I had a second spoonful. Haven't dropped dead yet. You want to try this? Yeah. I'm not... It's... It's really not that good. I don't know if our cat would eat it up. Just try it. You are such a baby. Well, it's... That Minnesota... Yeah, that is foul. This is a first for 18th century cooking. We have never had a recipe fail as bad as this one has. And you know, it's not... The crab was good. Everything... It should have been right. But something just is not right about this. Something's not working with something. No. So... But you know what? That's what 18th century cooking is all about. That's why we dig into the cookbooks and try to figure these things out. Sometimes we get the recipe wrong. Maybe we got the recipe wrong. Maybe there's something that we... Or maybe their just taste buds were different than ours. I don't know what it is. But this is... Well, he said it. Foul. It just does not work. No. But again, this is a learning experience. So thank you, Michael, for bringing this wonderful learning experience. Very interesting. Recipe... Recipe number one. If you know what I mean. Thanks for coming along on this journey as we savor the flavors and the aromas of the 18th century.