A Terrible Discovery! - Historic Stewed Crab Dish

welcome to 18th century cooking i'm your host john 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 [Music] 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 with holds 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 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 now this recipe comes from the early 1700s and we're still pretty much living on the 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 and you had to live and you could barter if you 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 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 right and jazza recently right you know they're right of mine 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 um 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 um 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 [Music] 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 i can't come here anymore without uh having the nutmeg so we've got a picture 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 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 and sealant so [Music] 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 [Music] um okay well i'm not sure what's in here michael um no no needs to be a little brighter tastes a little i 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 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 it's really not that good i don't know if our cat would eat it just try it you were such a baby well it's this was just that minnesota 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 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 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

Channel: Townsends

Views: 427,594

Rating: 4.9714265 out of 5

Keywords: townsends, jas townsend and son, reenacting, history, 18th century, 19th century, jon townsend, 18th century cooking

Id: xfRpxj29RXE

Length: 10min 11sec (611 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Plantasaurus]

I like crab, I like egg yolk and I even like anchovies... but what sort of primitive monster considered that combination to be delicious.

[u/thecaramel]

I think it's one of those times when proportions and technique really matter. The ingredients alone don't make for a bad dish.

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Start by sauteeing the chopped anchovies in the pan until they dissolve. Then warm up the crab meat and season with pepper and nutmeg (although nutmeg really should be optional). Add like a fifth of the amount of white wine and let it bubble away. Take the pan off the fire and whisk in the thoroughly mixed egg yolk and breadcrumbs to thicken up the sauce. Add salt to taste. Serve with some bread.

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It should be pretty decent now.

[u/falcon5768]

I enjoy in the years of watching these guys do an amazing job that you finally get to see them completely fucking crack and say this is awful.

Like they legit have eaten some recipes I would never even have thought could be good.

[u/Riderz__of_Brohan]

lmao even the music stops when he drops the act

[u/Longjumping_Pea8333]

How bad could it really be? Its just crab with some wine, breadcrumbs, an egg, a small anchoive. Interesting

[u/ProfessorSillyPutty]

I feel very confident I could make a delicious crab cake with a white wine sauce using these exact ingredients.

[u/Caiur]

It's great to see them finally make a dish that they don't like. Maybe in the future, they can try to redo it.

[u/ShadowMask87]

It's not fowl, it's crab.

[u/noremac_9000]

Barf