Melt away with these crabbed-up sandwiches

I can understand that point of view, but I would also like to introduce you to delicious things like lobster mac and cheese, seafood Alfredo, shrimp over cheesy grits, or even a New York City bagel stuffed with lox and cream cheese. Sometimes the combination just works.

This sandwich I’m writing about today has a focus on a blend of crab meat and processed cheese. Yeah, you read that correctly, but we’ll also introduce a pickled element in the form of a crunchy slaw. Along with the cheesy crab and slaw, I’m sharing a great way to use up sourdough discard and my newest bread recipe in the form of sourdough English muffins. It’s currently hot as heck, so English muffins work pretty well since you don’t have to bake them in the oven.

A search on Google will come up with tons of recipes that all use similar ingredients. My mom called these crab melts, but you can find recipes for crab delights, crabbies, crab meltaways, or even deviled crab melts. This cheesy crab concept, or something very similar, even shows up in a movie that I do not remember watching, but my wife claims I did, called Silver Linings Playbook. The dish that Bradley Cooper’s character gets so excited about takes on the name “Crabby snacks.” All of these crab recipes I’ve linked to and mentioned are practically identical; they all contain Kraft Old English cheese, and they seem to have been most popular along the East Coast of the United States.

The earliest recipe I found was from the early 1980s, but some online sources claim crab meltaways were invented in the 1960s, and it’s very possible that someone at Kraft created the recipe in a marketing ploy to promote the spreadable Old English cheese.

Below are photos of my mom’s recipe, which is very similar to the other two recipes I’ve already shared. My mom was collecting family recipes into a book to share with the rest of our family and friends, and I’ve found that a lot of recipes from that era were composed of very similar ingredient lists with differing instructions. I didn’t even ask her because she’s been making crab melts for 40+ years, but she either got inspiration for the recipe from a cookbook or magazine, or it was from another friend before she added it to her collection.

You can totally see how much abuse my mom’s cookbook has received over the past 15+ years since she had it printed. My mom’s recipe, plus her instructions, is what I used to base the sandwich recipe I end up sharing down below.

What is deviled crab?

I do not have any proof of this, but it seems likely to me that deviled crab could have been the precursor to crab melts.

There are two different dishes that take on the name of deviled crab. One was invented in the Tampa region of Florida, and it’s very similar to what Marylanders would call a fried crab cake. The second type of deviled crab originated on the east coast of the United States, somewhere between Georgia and Maryland, and in this version, crab meat is mixed with bread crumbs and spices and then added back to the opened crab shell to be served and eaten with a fork. This version is more similar to what East Coasters would call a crab meltaway or crabbie snacks, minus the processed cheese and with the addition of bread crumbs. Deviled crab is often stuffed back inside the hollowed-out crab shell and served that way.

There are thousands, if not more, deviled crab recipes online; this one is from a cookbook my mom’s close family friend (and, in turn, my friend) Jessie Owens created back in the early 2000s. Mrs Owens died in 2009, and she was a great friend to my mother. She was a much respected cook, entertainer, and a longtime teacher who shared a lot of what she knew in this valuable-to-me (and others) cookbook. This particular recipe is attributed to Jack Potts, whom I do not know, but here it is if you want to give it a shot.

I found this Carolina crab tartlet recipe from a Junior League of Raleigh cookbook from the early 2000s. This isn’t really deviled crab, but it’s sort of leaning crab melts with Swiss cheese instead, so I added the example here.

It’s hard to create a recipe for this that I can share because the amount of discard that you’ll have will vary, so I once again created a very easy calculator that you can plug in the amount of discard that you have, and it will calculate how much of the other ingredients you will need to make a great batch of “cracker bread.” This is all using something similar to a “baker’s formula” to calculate 1 percent of salt and the right amount of butter and cheese that will create great flavor.

Check out my discard cracker bread calculator below. Next time you’re feeding your starter, you can apply it and have a simple recipe to create something tasty.