Welcome to 18th century cooking I'm your host Jon Townsend we have a
special guest in the kitchen today Michael Dragoo and he's brought what dishes have you brought?
Stewed crabs. That looks delicious thank you so much Michael thanks for
joining us as we savor the flavors in 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 coasts
or in inland and we tend to pay a lot of money for it. In 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 uh many times if they they were
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 a 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 um 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 um 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 this would have been could have been a very inexpensive dish. It is very few
um 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're
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, breadcrumbs, 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 the pan it calls for about a half a cup okay and that's that's about a half a cup
and if I were to introduce that egg yolk as the preparation is
warming um it'll 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 this I think they
just want a slight thickening so we're going to go with that you want black pepper too now okay
here's our box pepper I like black pepper we're going to load it up. And then I can't come here
anymore without uh having the nutmeg so we've got a pinch of nutmeg. This is in the recipe right?
Yes it is there it is. We're not cheating this has really gotten up making it about a half a nutmeg.
I think that's more than a little bit. More? All right, stop it, thank you. All righty, then we're
just gonna mix the crab in with this okay I'm gonna pour this in here and we'll just mix it up.
there we go. And then our last bit is just pouring it all together.
So this mixture it looks great looks like we could eat it right now but obviously
it needs to go on the fire right? Gentle charcoal fire in the skillet.
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 the question is, is this the one that breaks the rule? Because it just doesn't
it doesn't look it might be the one together are we doing this together? okay let's go.
Mm okay well I'm not sure what's in here Michael um no no. Needs to be a little brighter tastes a
little I don't know when it's brighter a little I'd add a little salt but it didn't call for it
yeah maybe another anchovy that's the saltiness I think the anchovy is the
thing that's in here that I don't like. Yeah I don't know you know I had a second spoonful
I haven't dropped dead yet. You want to try this yeah I don't I'm not.
It's really not that good I don't know if our cat would eat it just try it
you are such a baby. Oh my goodness, what is that?
Well it's This was just 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 the everything it should have been right but
something just is not right about this. No, something's not working with something. That's
no, so but you know what that's what 18th century cooking is all about that's 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 got or maybe they're 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 uh this is a learning experience
so thank you Michael for bringing this wonderful learning experience very interesting recipe
Still 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.