A Love Affair with Southern Cooking (32 page)

4 tablespoons (½ stick) butter

1 small yellow onion, finely chopped

2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

¹
/
₈
teaspoon white pepper

¹
/
₈
teaspoon ground hot red pepper (cayenne)

¹
/
₈
teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

1 cup half-and-half

2 tablespoons Amontillado sherry

½ cup mayonnaise (measure firmly packed)

2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

½ teaspoon salt

1 pound lump crabmeat, picked over for bits of shell and cartilage, then flaked

Sweet paprika

• 1.
  Preheat the oven to 450° F. Spritz a 5-to 6-cup gratin dish with nonstick cooking spray and set aside.
  
• 2.
  Melt 2 tablespoons of the butter in a small, heavy saucepan over moderate heat, add the onion, and cook, stirring often, for 5 to 8 minutes until lightly browned. Blend in the flour, both peppers, and nutmeg, and cook and stir for 1 minute. Add the half-and-half and sherry and cook, stirring constantly, for 3 to 5 minutes until thickened and smooth. Remove from the heat and blend in the mayonnaise, lemon juice, and salt; set aside.
  
• 3.
  Melt the remaining 2 tablespoons butter in a large, heavy skillet over moderate heat. Add the crab and warm for 1 minute, taking care not to break up the lumps. Gently fold the reserved cream sauce into the crab.
  
• 4.
  Scoop all into the gratin dish, blush the top with paprika, slide onto the middle oven shelf, and bake uncovered for about 15 minutes or until bubbling and tipped with brown.
  
• 5.
  Serve at once, accompanied, if you like, with fluffy boiled rice.
  

CRABMEAT NORFOLK

MAKES
4
SERVINGS

No one is quite sure who created this elegant but easy crab dish or how it got its name. For years, Crabmeat Norfolk was the specialty of the old, original O’Donnell’s Restaurant in downtown Washington, D.C., and to this day, it’s a signature dish at O’Donnell’s Seafood Restaurant in Gaithersburg, Maryland. This restaurant claims that Tom O’Donnell created Crabmeat Norfolk (or at least the Norfolk style of cooking shellfish) back in 1922 while cruising the Chesapeake; he’d pick the meat from fresh-caught crabs and sauté it quickly in butter. On the other hand, Craig Claiborne, for years the food columnist of
The New York Times
,
credits W. O. Snowden of Norfolk’s late, lamented Snowden and Mason Restaurant for creating the recipe in 1924. Snowden’s butter-bathed lumps of crab delicately spiked with vinegar is the version most widely accepted today. It was baked, Claiborne wrote, “in a Norfolk aluminum pan,” a sort of gratin that was manufactured in Norfolk at the time. Hence the name Crabmeat Norfolk. The recipe here approximates the original. To accompany it I like fluffy boiled rice and a salad of crisp greens or, even better, fresh asparagus drizzled with olive oil, then roasted for 10 to 12 minutes in a 400° F. oven.

1 pound lump crabmeat, picked over for bits of shell and cartilage, then flaked

1½ tablespoons white wine vinegar or tarragon vinegar

¼ teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon hot red pepper sauce

¼ teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

5 tablespoons cold butter, cut into small dice

• 1.
  Preheat the oven to 375° F.
  
• 2.
  Place the crab in a medium-size mixing bowl; add the vinegar, salt, hot pepper sauce, and Worcestershire sauce, and toss lightly. Transfer to an ungreased, nonreactive 1-quart gratin dish and dot evenly with the butter.
  
• 3.
  Slide onto the middle oven shelf and bake uncovered for 15 to 20 minutes or until bubbly.
  
• 4.
  Serve at once.
  

Harder than a landlord’s heart.

—
DAMON RUNYON
,
ON THE TOUGHNESS OF FLORIDA STONE CRAB SHELLS

CRISPY SOFT-SHELLS

MAKES
4
SERVINGS

“It usually comes in the third or fourth week of May, with a full waning moon,” William W. Warner writes in his Pulitzer Prize–winning
Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay
(1976). “Not hundreds, but thousands of peelers will be taken by the best scrappers. The first run of soft crabs, as it is always called, has begun.” When I was a little girl spending a chunk of every summer at our Chesapeake Bay cottage, an old waterman told me that a soft-shell is merely a crab that has shed its hard shell. “Only way for ’em to grow,” he explained. I wasn’t aware until years later that soft-shells were a singular delicacy. In New York we cheered the spring arrival of soft-shells, then plunged into a summer of feasting, sometimes at home but more often at restaurants where these fragile creatures were treated with respect. Today, “piling on” seems to be the mantra of trendy chefs: piling on of sauces, piling on of seasonings, piling on of garnishes and accoutrements. Too bad. I’ve yet to see anyone improve on fresh soft-shells bounced in and out of a hot skillet. And I think most Southerners would agree.

8 fresh soft-shell crabs, cleaned and dressed

½ cup unsifted all-purpose flour

¼ cup unsifted stone-ground cornmeal

1 teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon black pepper

2 to 4 tablespoons vegetable oil

2 tablespoons butter

2 large lemons, quartered lengthwise

• 1.
  Wash the crabs under cool running water and pat dry on paper toweling. Combine the flour, cornmeal, salt, and pepper in a pie pan, then dredge the soft-shells in the mixture on both sides, shaking off the excess.
  
• 2.
  Heat 2 tablespoons of the oil and 1 tablespoon of the butter in a large, heavy skillet over high heat for about 2 minutes or until almost smoking.
  
• 3.
  Add half the crabs and cook 3 to 5 minutes on each side or until crisply browned. Lift to paper toweling to drain. Brown the rest of the crabs the same way, adding the remaining butter, and if needed, another 1 to 2 tablespoons vegetable oil.
  
• 4.
  Serve hot with wedges of lemon.
  

HERBED CRAB SALAD

MAKES
4
SERVINGS

Here’s another original from Lisa Ruffin Harrison of Evelynton Plantation on the James (see her Charcoal-Grilled Shad Roe, Chapter 3). “There’s no better summer lunch in this world,” she says, “than this crab salad served in tomatoes fresh from the garden.” For hors d’oeuvre, Lisa sometimes stuffs the crab salad into cherry tomatoes; there’s enough here for six dozen. The only crabmeat to use is “backfin lump,” Lisa says. The challenge is to keep the lumps intact as you
pick over the crab, removing bits of shell and cartilage, then mix in the herb mayonnaise.

4 large sun-ripened tomatoes

½ teaspoon salt

1 pound lump crabmeat

2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

¹
/
₈
teaspoon ground hot red pepper (cayenne)

¹
/
₈
teaspoon black pepper

4 to 5 tablespoons Fresh Herb Mayonnaise (recipe follows)

2 to 3 tablespoons finely snipped fresh chives

• 1.
  Cut ¼ inch off the top of each tomato, then scoop out the pulp, leaving tomato shells ½ inch thick. Sprinkle the insides of the tomatoes with the salt, then drain upside down on paper toweling for 20 minutes. Save the tomato tops and pulp for salad another day.
  
• 2.
  Place the crabmeat in a large nonreactive bowl and sprinkle with 1 tablespoon of the lemon juice. Carefully fork the crabmeat apart, removing bits of shell and cartilage. In a separate large nonreactive bowl, combine the remaining lemon juice, the cayenne, and black pepper with 4 tablespoons of the mayonnaise.
  
• 3.
  Add the crab and turn it in the dressing just enough to mix without breaking up the lumps. If the salad seems dry, gently mix in the remaining tablespoon of mayonnaise.
  
• 4.
  Scoop into the tomatoes, scatter the chives on top, and serve as the main course of a light luncheon.
  

FRESH HERB MAYONNAISE

MAKES ABOUT
2
CUPS

This quick mayonnaise is delicious with chicken, turkey, and shrimp salad as well as with the crab salad that precedes. It was created by Lisa Ruffin Harrison of Evelynton Plantation, who grows her own herbs. Note:
Because this mayonnaise calls for raw eggs, use the pasteurized here (see About Pasteurized Eggs, frontmatter).
Update:
A busy working mother like many women today, Lisa has simplified this recipe, which originally appeared in
Bon Appétit
back in the late 1980s. That was shortly before she married. “If you don’t feel like making a mayonnaise, which these days I find I never have time for,” she recently e-mailed me, “just use a good mayo like Duke’s, our fabulous local brand. Without Duke’s I’d use Hellmann’s but no sweet varieties—heaven forbid!” That means omitting the eggs and the oil below and blending a good commercial mayonnaise with the remaining recipe ingredients. And how much mayonnaise would that be? My suggestion—not Lisa’s—would be to start with 1 cup because this is a good dressing to have on hand. If the flavors seem strong, blend in another half cup or so. Lisa’s homemade mayonnaise, after all, makes two cups.

2 large pasteurized eggs (see Note above)

2 tablespoons Dijon mustard

1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

3 tablespoons coarsely chopped fresh basil

3 tablespoons coarsely snipped fresh dill

2 tablespoons coarsely chopped Italian parsley

¹
/
₈
teaspoon ground hot red pepper (cayenne)

¹
/
₈
teaspoon black pepper

¹
/
₈
teaspoon salt

1 cup vegetable oil

• 1.
  Blend the eggs, mustard, lemon juice, basil, dill, parsley, cayenne, black pepper, and salt in a food processor for about 1 minute or until reduced to a paste.
  
• 2.
  With the motor running, slowly drizzle the oil down the feed tube, then continue processing until the mayonnaise is thick.
  
• 3.
  Transfer the mayonnaise to a small nonreactive bowl, cover, and store in the refrigerator for up to three days.