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Crab Meat and Tomato Jelly Salad
In a salad bowl lined with Lettuce leaves, arrange separate piles of 1/2 pound crab meat 3 hard-cooked eggs, chopped (use silver knife so white will not discolor) 2 roots celery or 1/2 pound endive cut in small pieces, and Tomato jelly cut in cubes. Between piles place Green pepper free from seeds and cut in strips. Make a nest of heart leaves of lettuce in center and fill with Mayonnaise dressing. The salad ingredients may be mixed lightly together, when salad is being served, or only those ingredients that are desired may be served to each person.
A composed salad rather than a tossed one, and it depends on two things the original assumes you already have: a set tomato aspic and a bowl of mayonnaise. Make both a day ahead and the assembly takes ten minutes.
- Tomato jellyThis is tomato aspic, set with gelatin, and the capitalisation suggests the book expected you to turn to its own recipe for it. Any firm tomato aspic works, but it must be set hard enough to cut into clean cubes — as a rough guide, about 1 tablespoon of powdered gelatin per 2 cups of liquid, well chilled.
- "2 roots celery"Celery was sold by the root or head, what a supermarket now calls a bunch or stalk. Two heads is a large quantity for a salad of this size; one head, ribs diced small, is closer to modern proportion, and the endive alternative is the 1/2 pound the recipe gives, about 8 oz.
- Crab meatHalf a pound of picked, cooked crab; refrigerated pasteurized lump or backfin is the easiest modern equivalent. Pick it over for cartilage and shell fragments before it goes on the plate.
- The silver knifeThe instruction is about carbon steel, not silver. An old carbon-steel blade reacts with sulfur in the egg white and grays it. Modern stainless does the same job the silver was doing, so use any knife you like.
- Green pepperRaw and cut in thin strips. If raw bell pepper is assertive for your table, blanch the strips 30 seconds and chill them; the color holds and the flavor softens.
- MayonnaisePeriod mayonnaise was raw-yolk and made to order. Commercial mayonnaise is made with acidified egg and holds far better in a salad that sits out. If you make your own, use pasteurized eggs and keep the salad cold until it goes to the table.
- Assembly and timingCube the aspic and dress the bowl no more than 30 minutes before serving. The jelly weeps as it warms and the lettuce collapses under the liquid.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the quantities suggest roughly 4 as a luncheon main course, or 6 as a first course.
Composed salads like this one are characteristic of the American luncheon table of the early twentieth century, when cookbooks aimed at hostesses gave space to food that could be arranged in advance, carried to the table on one dish, and eaten without a knife. The tomato jelly fits that pattern: powdered gelatin was cheap and reliable by then, and aspic appeared in everything from ring molds to garnish cubes, valued as much for the way it held its shape on a plate as for its flavor. The arrangement here — separate piles of ingredients around a center of dressing, so that each guest takes only what they care for — was a familiar style of service, and the book's closing sentence spells out the thinking behind it. The instruction to use a silver knife on the eggs points to a kitchen still working with carbon-steel blades that discolored anything sulfurous, though such instructions persisted in print for a long time and cannot narrowly date the page.