Crab Salad
Marinate two cups crab meat with French dressing.
Drain; add one half cup mayonnaise dressing; arrange in crab shells. Chill. Garnish with pimolas and mayonnaise dressing.
A three-line luncheon salad that assumes you already have cooked crab, a jar of vinaigrette and a bowl of homemade mayonnaise on hand. The only real technique is the marinating step, and it is worth doing properly.
- The hinge: marinate, then drain hardThe French dressing is a seasoning step, not a sauce. Twenty to thirty minutes chilled is enough, and the crab must be drained thoroughly (a sieve, then a brief press with a paper towel) or the mayonnaise will slacken into a pink puddle in the shell.
- French dressingIn 1907 this means plain oil-and-vinegar vinaigrette, roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar with salt and pepper. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today.
- PimolasA trade name of the period for green olives stuffed with pimiento. Pimiento-stuffed Spanish olives, sliced crosswise, are the same thing.
- Two cups crab meatAbout 10-12 oz picked meat. Whichever you use, run your fingers through it for cartilage and shell fragments before dressing it.
- Crab shellsCleaned, scrubbed top shells from the crabs themselves, once standard equipment in a kitchen that bought crabs whole. Small ramekins, scallop shells or halved avocados serve the same purpose.
- MayonnaiseThe book assumes homemade mayonnaise made with raw yolk. Commercial mayonnaise, made with pasteurized egg, is thicker and sweeter; loosen it with a spoonful of lemon juice to get closer to the intended texture.
- Keep it coldDressed crab is a fast-spoiling salad. Chill the shells before filling and do not leave the finished plates out for more than an hour.
- YieldServes four as a first course or light lunch, two as a main salad.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer — one of many turn-of-the-century cookbooks issued by a food firm to promote its product, though the savory chapters like this one range well beyond cocoa. Crab salad served back in the shell belongs to the era's formal luncheon table, where individual portions arranged in their own natural container were a mark of care; the same impulse produced lobster in the shell, oysters on the half shell and scallops served in scallop dishes. The pimola garnish dates the page as precisely as anything in it: pimiento-stuffed olives were a fashionable novelty in American kitchens in the first decade of the century, and cookbooks of the period scatter them over everything from salads to sandwich fillings.