[Sca-cooks] Looking for Crab recipes

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach DeeWolff at aol.com:
>So, Am I right in discovering that there a few crab recipes available in
>period (2 that I know of)??
>
>Have we no crab cakes or in a coffin, or with rice?? I was hoping to do
>something other than the familiar...
>
>Andrea

There don't seem to be too many of them. You've got the Harleian MS 
recipe (which basically says to boil them and serve with vinegar), 
and one or two others, essentially identical. Then you've got the 
dressed crab in the Proper Neue (or is it Neue Proper?) Boke of 
Cokery, which involves picking the meat out of the shell, seasoning 
it with vinegar, and maybe some butter (I forget, offhand), and 
packing it back into the shell.

Chiquart has a stuffed crayfish tail which calls for the chopped, 
cooked meat to be seasoned (vinegar?) and chopped parsley added, 
stuffed back into two of the tail shells, like a sandwich, and fried 
in oil. I'd be a little concerned about the lack of any binder to the 
stuffing. Maybe you have to tie the shells together.

You said you were looking for something to bulk out the crab. I 
think, if I were you, I'd do a blomanger of fish and just use 
crabmeat, maybe garnishing with a smaller percentage of crab shells 
so people know what they're getting into (Hint: 
PRE...COOK..THE...RICE...!!!).

Are you thinking of doing blue crabs on the hoof, as it were, or just 
getting hold of processed crabmeat?

Adamantius