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Crab Ravigote
Boil some large hardshell crabs, after which put them aside to become cold.
Then turn them over on the hardshell side and with a sharp knife cut the breast away. Pick the meat off, clean it nicely, being careful not to leave any pieces of shell in it, and season lightly with salt and pepper. Mix with thick remoulade sauce and fill up one of the shells, which has previously been washed clean, with the mixture. The meat of two good sized crabs so treated will be sufficient to fill the inside of one shell. Cover the meat with mayonnaise and decorate with fillet of anchovy and sliced pickles.
Serve on a folded napkin with branches of parsley and quartered lemon. ("Oscar").-Mrs D. Webster Dougherty, Philadelphia.
A cold crab salad served back in the shell, from the era when a dressed shell on a folded napkin was standard cold-buffet presentation. Nothing here is difficult, but the sauces do the work and the original assumes you already know them.
- Ravigote or remouladeThe title says ravigote and the method says remoulade. Classically these are distinct sauces, and the mismatch may simply be loose use of French sauce names. Note that the recipe as written uses two: a thick seasoned remoulade mixed through the meat, then plain mayonnaise spread over the top. A seasoned mayonnaise -- mustard, chopped capers, cornichon, parsley, tarragon, chives, a little anchovy, lemon -- covers the remoulade element if you prefer to make one sauce and use it for both.
- "Thick" mattersThe sauce has to bind cold crab without weeping in the shell. Use a stiff mayonnaise, dress the meat lightly, and drain the crab well first. Thin sauce collapses into the shell and looks like it has been sitting out.
- The crabsHardshell here most likely means blue crab. Two good-sized crabs yield only a few ounces of picked meat, which the recipe says is enough to fill one top shell; if you buy picked lump meat instead, scale by volume against the shell you are filling.
- Using the shellScrub the top shells, discard the gills and the soft internal matter, and boil the empty shells a few minutes before filling. Trim the ragged edge with kitchen shears. Ceramic crab shells and shallow ramekins are the modern substitute if the shells are broken.
- Handle coldEverything in this dish is served cold and never reheated, so keep the picked meat refrigerated from the moment it cools and dress it shortly before serving. Cooked crab and mayonnaise are both unforgiving if they stand at room temperature.
- Folding, not stirringBlue crab lump breaks down to mush under a spoon. Fold the sauce through in a few strokes so the pieces stay recognizable.
- The garnishAnchovy fillets and sliced pickles are what the recipe calls for. Rolled anchovy fillets, cornichons cut lengthwise, a lemon quarter and parsley give the intended effect, served on the folded napkin as directed.
- YieldTwo crabs make one filled shell, so count one shell per person as a first course and figure two crabs per guest.
The parenthetical "(Oscar)" is generally taken as a credit to Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born ma tre d'h tel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, whose name was attached to a number of dishes in the 1890s and 1900s. Sauce ravigote takes its name from the French ravigoter, to revive or perk up, and in classical usage covers both a warm velout\-based sauce and a cold vinaigrette or mayonnaise heavy with capers, mustard and herbs; this recipe blurs it with remoulade. Blue crab was cheap and abundant on the Atlantic coast, and this recipe serves it in the shell.