[Sca-cooks] Looking for Crab recipes

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Bronwynmgn at aol.com:
>In a message dated 1/11/2004 10:27:51 AM Eastern Standard Time,
>DeeWolff at aol.com writes:
>
><<So, Am I right in discovering that there a few crab recipes available in
>period (2 that I know of)??>>
>
>So far, nothing in Forme of Cury or The Medieval Kitchen.  Libellus de arte
>coquinaria doesn't have anything listed in the index for crabs, and there's
>nothing in Vivendier. Lots of stuff for lobster, crayfish, mussels, 
>oysters, and
>such, but not crab.

It may simply be that crabs of a sort worthy of the attention of the 
wealthy cookbook-owning class weren't common in the areas those books 
came from.

Another possibility is that crabs were a seaside food (like whelks, 
periwinkles, cockles, etc.), which appear to have been eaten, but for 
which there may not be a lot of recipes (I can recall one whelk 
recipe from the entire medieval corpus, offhand), since you'd be 
eating them in little inns by the seaside, and pretty much, nowhere 
else.

I mean, for all the 19th-century English predilection for whelks, 
winkles, cockles, and, say, jellied ells (which, for all I know, are 
still available in places like Brighton or Dover, but which 
definitely _were_ available as recently as the 1930's), how many 
recipes for those foods appear in Mrs. Beeton?

Andrea asked about Dungeness crabs: they're a firm, sweet lump 
crabmeat, almost like lobster, but more tender, and the meat, 
obviously, is in bigger chunks (or could be) than the meat of our 
local blue crabs. Should stand up to seasoning and mixing with other 
ingredients just fine. And, if it makes a difference, they are 
physically, if not taxonomically, pretty close to the kind of big 
torteau crabs common in the Eastern Atlantic. But they're expensive 
on the East Coast.

Adamantius the not-yet-caffeinated, fixated on the sound of 80 people 
in a church hall, sucking on periwinkles