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Crab Salad
One dozen crabs, 2 roots of celery, 2 heads of lettuce, 1/2 pint of Mayonnaise.
Boil the crabs in salted water thirty minutes; when perfectly cold, pick out the meat and stand away until wanted. Brush and cut the celery into pieces a half inch long, when ready to serve mix with the crab meat, arrange neatly on a bowl with the lettuce leaves and serve the Mayonnaise in a separate bowl. A very pretty way is to arrange the celery and crab meat in the back shells of the crabs. Stand each on a salad plate on a bed of lettuce leaves, and pass Mayonnaise with them.
A late-nineteenth-century composed salad that assumes you bought live crabs and had celery in the house. The ingredient line is incomplete by modern standards, so the quantities need filling in before you shop.
- What the list leaves outNo amount of crab or celery is given. For four servings, figure about 1 lb picked crabmeat (roughly 8-12 hard-shell blue crabs, or 3-4 Dungeness) and 3-4 celery ribs.
- Half a pint of MayonnaiseOne cup. That is generous for four; the recipe passes it separately rather than dressing the salad, so leftovers keep a few days refrigerated.
- Thirty minutes is far too longThis is the hinge. Hard-shell blue crabs are done in 12-15 minutes in boiling salted water, Dungeness in 15-20 depending on size. Half an hour leaves the meat stringy and washed-out, and it will shred rather than come out in lumps.
- Cool completely, as instructed"Perfectly cold" is not fussiness. Warm crabmeat weeps liquid that thins the mayonnaise and makes the lettuce collapse. Chill the crabs in ice water, then pick and refrigerate.
- Brushing the celeryNineteenth-century celery was grown banked up in soil and arrived gritty. Modern trimmed celery needs only a rinse, though pulling the coarse strings from the outer ribs is still worth doing.
- Serving in the back shellsScrub the top shells well after picking, boil them a few minutes and dry them. Choose the largest and most intact; a good-sized blue-crab shell holds roughly a third to a half cup, depending on the crab.
- Homemade mayonnaiseMayonnaise of this period is typically raw-egg and never heated. If you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, use pasteurized eggs or a commercial mayonnaise.
- YieldTwo heads of lettuce and a cup of mayonnaise suggest four to six as a first course, or four as a light lunch.
Celery was itself a semi-luxury then, sold in tall glass celery vases at table and prized for its crispness rather than its flavor, which is why so many salads of the period pair it with crab, lobster or chicken for texture. Serving a dressed mixture back in the crab's own top shell is generally traced to the French practice of using scallop and crab shells as individual dishes, and it survives in deviled crab and crab imperial.