Potted Crab
The delicacy, clean texture, briny tang, and nutty flavor of steamed crab meat inspired such intense seasonal devotion that lovers of seafood quite understandably wished to make the meat a year round resource. Freezing cooked crab meat mars the texture. That’s why the frozen legs of Alaskan King or Snow crab are fibrous or sometimes mushy. While frozen soft shell crabs can be excellent in quality and flavor, the same cannot be said of frozen backfin lump meat. The rapidity with which crab meat, even cooked crab meat, will spoil made people cautious when experimenting with preservation methods. Bad crab can twist one’s gastric tract into a vile corridor of anguish. Food poisoning of the most excruciating sort. So when looking over historical methods for preserving crab meat, one can only trust those of the longest standing and with the most unambiguous and detailed instructions.
In the Carolina Receipt Book (1832), the first cookbook published in South Carolina composed by a Carolinian, one encounters a recipe for potted crab. This is a parallel to the much more popular potted shrimp a.k.a. “shrimp paste.” It is curious for being double cooked. The one step not articulated is that after baking it is cooled, the butter will re-congeal into a solid, and if covered and kept in a cool/cold place, will keep for lengths of time. I present the recipe in full:
In the 20th century the meaning of “potted crab” changed, coming to mean a form of crab salad using mustard tinged mayonnaise as a binder. This became a popular “first course” meal on banquet menus. James Beard explained in 1972 that potted crab was “simply the meat and fat from the shell mixed with freshly chopped herbs and seasonings and abound with mustard and mayonnaise”. [“Specialties reflecting Management’s Taste Star in London Restaurant,” Staten Island Advance (October 22, 1972), 60]. There is no preservative medium in this preparation, like the congealed fat of 19th century potted crab, so one wonders how the meaning of the dish morphed over the years.
The secret of traditional potted crab lay in (1) incorporating some of the crab’s fat into the mixture, (2) adding nutmeg or mace to the mashed meat and butter, and (3) not being too heavy handed in salting the mixture, and (4) using dry mustard powder rather than prepared mustard in your mixture.
I was speaking with a fish monger at the H-Mart in Arcadia CA about preserving steamed crab meat in fat. He indicated that one issue with potted crab is that the flavor of the fat (whether butter or duck fat) can sometime render the flavor of the crab meat rather wan. He said that dried crab shells pounded into crab dust can re-impart the proper crab flavor into the mix. Well stocked Asian markets carry this powder. I will keep that in mind.