Crab Salad
1 dozen crabs ½ pint of mayonnaise 2 heads of lettuce Put the crabs in warm water, add a tablespoonful of salt, stand the kettle over a brisk fire and boil thirty minutes. Take out to cool. When cold pick out the meat and put it away until wanted. Wash and dry the lettuce carefully and make the mayonnaise. Stand all away on the ice until wanted.
When ready to serve, mix the crab meat and mayonnaise lightly together. Garnish the dish with the lettuce leaves, place the mixture in the centre, and serve.
Or, this salad may be served in the back shell of the crabs, garnished with the lettuce leaves.
A late-Victorian summer salad that is really an assembly job: boiled crab, mayonnaise, cold lettuce. Only the boiling time and the quantity of dressing need rethinking.
- Thirty minutes is too longCrabs of the size sold whole need roughly 15 minutes in hard-boiling water, timed from the return to the boil. Half an hour tends to toughen the lump meat.
- Start hot, not warmThe instruction to put crabs into warm water and bring the kettle up is a period habit. Use water already at a rolling boil, well salted, and cook in batches so the temperature does not crash.
- Cleaning the picked meatAfter the crabs cool, pull off the apron and top shell, discard the feathery gills, the stomach sac behind the eyes and the yellow-brown hepatopancreas if you dislike it. Pick over the meat for shell fragments and cartilage before dressing.
- A pint and a half of mayonnaiseThat is three cups, far more than a dozen crabs need. A dozen crabs yields roughly three-quarters of a pound to a pound of picked meat, which is generously dressed with three-quarters of a cup. Add it a spoonful at a time.
- Raw-egg mayonnaisePeriod mayonnaise is uncooked yolk, oil and vinegar, served cold and never heated. If you make it from scratch, use pasteurized eggs, keep it below 40F, and eat it the same day.
- "Stand away on the ice"A period icebox ran warmer and damper than a refrigerator. Chill the crab, the lettuce and the mayonnaise separately and combine them at the last moment, or the dressing thins and the lettuce wilts.
- Serving in the shellIf you use the back shells as dishes, scrub them inside and out and boil them a few minutes on their own before filling. Two heads of lettuce is enough for a bed under twelve shells.
- YieldAs written this serves six to eight as a light main course in hot weather, or twelve as a first course in the shells.
This comes out of the American summer-cookery tradition that Sarah Tyson Rorer, principal of the Philadelphia Cooking School, did much to codify in the 1880s and 90s: cold, quickly assembled dishes for households with no wish to keep a coal range roaring in August. The recipe carries no attribution, so any connection to her own hand is inference rather than record. Crab salad in her period, at least along the mid-Atlantic, was likely to mean the Atlantic blue crab, hauled from the Chesapeake and the Delaware and cheap enough in season that a dozen was an unremarkable purchase. The lavish hand with mayonnaise is itself a marker of the moment. Mayonnaise had moved from French professional kitchens into American middle-class cookbooks over the previous generation. Serving the salad heaped back into the scrubbed shells was a standard Victorian conceit, the same instinct that produced oysters returned to their half-shells and mushrooms stuffed with their own stems.