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Crab Salad
Crack the large claws of a crab and pick out the white meat in as large pieces as possible. Lay the contents of the carapace in the middle of a large dish; on that put the pickings from the breast, and on the top the pieces from the claws. Surround the pile with a small quantity of mixed salad, quartered lettuce-hearts, blanched endive, or water-cress. Pour a little mayonnaise or salad-dressing over the whole, and garnish the dish with the small claws and a little green parsley. The four black tips of the shells of the large claws, which children call soldiers, may be placed at the four corners. Be careful that the mixed salad is thoroughly dry. Time to prepare, three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost of crabs, from 10d. to 3s. 6d. each. Sufficient, a medium-sized crab for four persons.
An assembly rather than a cooked dish: the book assumes you have already boiled the crab and know how to dress it. The work is in the picking and the plating.
- Start with a cooked crabNothing here is cooked, so the crab must arrive boiled and cold. A dressed crab from the fishmonger, or a whole cooked crab you pick yourself, both work; chilled pasteurised picked crabmeat is the shortcut, though you lose the shell for garnish.
- "The contents of the carapace"This is the brown meat from the body shell — soft, rich, strongly flavoured. It forms the base of the pile because it will not hold a shape, while the white claw meat sits on top where it can be seen.
- What to discardBefore using the carapace meat, remove the stomach sac behind the mouth and the feathery grey gills (the "dead man's fingers") attached to the body. They are not poisonous, but they are unpleasant and grainy.
- Cracking the clawsTap the claw shell along its edge with the back of a heavy knife or a small hammer rather than crushing it, so shell fragments do not drive into the meat. Pick over the white meat on a pale plate afterwards to spot splinters.
- The hinge: dry salad leavesThe instruction to have the mixed salad "thoroughly dry" is the one that decides the dish. Water clinging to the leaves thins the mayonnaise and it slides off the crab into a pool at the base of the pile.
- "Soldiers"The black horny tips of the large claws, kept back as decoration. Purely visual, and easily skipped.
- DressingA little mayonnaise, poured over rather than mixed in, so the crab stays identifiable. Thin it with a spoonful of lemon juice if it is stiff enough to sit in lumps.
- Cost and yield"10d. to 3s. 6d." is pre-decimal: tenpence to three shillings and sixpence, a range too wide and too far removed to convert usefully. A medium crab of about 2 lb yields roughly 8 oz of picked meat and serves four as a light course.
A cold dish of the kind served at supper or summer luncheon, where a whole crab piled on a dish and ringed with lettuce hearts did the work that a platter of shellfish does now — impressive to look at, requiring no range time in a hot kitchen. The structure of the salad keeps brown and white crab meat separate rather than blending them, the pale claw meat given pride of place on top. Mayonnaise "or salad-dressing" allows for the boiled, cooked dressings used in British households of the period as well as the emulsified French sauce. The detail about children calling the black claw tips "soldiers" is the sort of domestic aside the book records, and suggests a dish eaten at family tables rather than only formal ones.