Hot sauce!

Every once in a while I get a little reminder at how much my cooking style and vocabulary have changed. To wit:

We have some "left over" crab meat. This is a rarity because 1) we don't usually have crab around here 2) this is fresh! and 3) I bought too much for a special dinner we did Sat. So now, this wonderful fresh blue crab, all hand-picked and cooked, has to be consumed. I asked the spouse if he had a preference and I was told to "surprise me."

He really should know better.

So I'm digging through the old recipes from Galveston days, when we did have crab more often because we could actually go and catch our own. I had several favs, crab au gratin and Newburg being among them. So I'm reading through these two to decide which might better suit my energy level this evening. It's a tie.

In each, you make a cream sauce. In one of them it references adding the "hot sauce." Really? I didn't remember seeing hot sauce of any kind in the ingredients. I scan up. No Tabasco mentioned. I re-read. Silly me. There in the not-so-fine print is the answer. The recipe has just made a cream sauce. It is hot. Add a bit of it to the egg yolks so they won't curdle when everything is mixed together.

Hot sauce, indeed.