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Crab Salad
Mix the crab meat, which has been cut into small pieces, with a French dressing, and let stand one hour. Then mix with an equal quantity of tender celery which has been cut into half-inch lengths. Add a mayonnaise dressing, and serve on lettuce leaves. Garnish with crab claws. Crab-and-Tomato Salad Peel carefully 6 large, firm potatoes and remove the centres. Chop and season the meat of 6 boiled crabs. Fill the hollowed tomatoes with this and set on ice for several hours. Serve on lettuce leaves.
Two salads run together here: a plain crab-and-celery salad, and a second in which seasoned crab fills hollowed tomatoes. Both assume you have picked your own crabs and have two dressings on hand.
- The hinge: dress twiceThe crab is first marinated in French dressing (oil, vinegar, salt, pepper — roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar) for an hour, then bound with mayonnaise only at the end. The acid seasons the meat through; adding mayonnaise at the start just coats it and mutes the flavour.
- How much crabFor the first salad, 1 lb of picked crabmeat with an equal volume of celery serves four to six. Lump or backfin holds its shape; claw meat is cheaper and better suited to the stuffed-tomato version, where it is chopped anyway.
- Six boiled crabsAssuming blue crabs of average size, six may yield only about 6-9 oz of picked meat in total, which is little enough for six tomatoes. Buying 12 oz to 1 lb of picked crabmeat is the easier course; pick through it for shell and cartilage.
- Handle the meat coldCrabmeat, cooked or pasteurised, is a fast-spoiling food. Keep it refrigerated through the marinating hour rather than at room temperature, and eat the stuffed tomatoes the day they are made.
- Hollowing tomatoesCut off the stem end, scoop out seeds and pulp, salt the inside lightly and invert on a rack for 20 minutes to drain. Otherwise the tomato water thins the filling.
- MayonnaisePeriod mayonnaise was made with raw yolks. Commercial mayonnaise, made with pasteurised egg, is the sensible substitute in a salad that sits chilled for several hours.
- "Set on ice"An icebox instruction: refrigerate. Two hours is enough to firm the filling; several hours makes the tomato flesh watery.
- GarnishThe crab claws are meant to be cooked, cracked and set around the plate. Skip them if you are working from picked meat rather than whole crabs.