• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1090 0

all but if forced to choose a favorite, I’d pick this 100-plus-year-old Baltimore classic first served at Thompson’s Sea Girt House. I’m not alone. It’s said that “crab cakes are to Crab Imperial as meatloaf is to prime ribs.” Note: You can prepare this recipe through Step 3 a couple of hours ahead of time. Scoop the crab mixture into the gratin dish, cover with foil, and refrigerate. When ready to bake, remove the foil, sprinkle with the paprika, and bake uncovered for 20 to 25 minutes or until bubbly and browned.

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.

* * *

TIME LINE: the people and events that shaped Southern Cuisine

1906

William Emerson Brock, a traveling salesman for the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, buys Chattanooga’s Trigg Candy Company. Three years later, he reincorporates it as the Brock Candy Company and builds it into one of America’s premier confectioners.

Young Italian immigrant Amedeo Obici, who had been selling his roasted peanuts from a horse-drawn cart in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, founds Planters with fellow immigrant Mario Peruzzi. In less than ten years, they relocate to the Virginia peanut country. (See Planters Peanuts, Chapter 1.)

Owen Wister’s romantic novel Lady Baltimore, set in Charleston, South Carolina, is published and popularizes Lady Baltimore cake. (See recipe, Chapter 6.)

To accommodate the growing community of Italians in New Orleans’s French Quarter, Salvatore Lupo creates the muffaletta sandwich at his Central Grocery. It’s a round loaf stuffed with Italian salami, ham, cheese, and olives.

When soil depletion and hurricanes destroy the pineapple crop in the Florida Keys, growers switch to Key limes.

* * *

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,