Crab Salad
One dozen crabs, one-half pint of mayonnaise dressing, two heads of lettuce. Boil hard-shell crabs for about twenty minutes.
When cool remove the top shell and tail; quarter the remainder and pick the meat out carefully with a fork. The large claws should not be overlooked nor the fat which adheres to the shell. Mix the crab meat with a little of the mayonnaise. Garnish the dish with crisp lettuce leaves. Place the crabs in the center and cover with the remainder of the mayonnaise. Or, the salad may be served in the back shell of the crab, garnished with the tiny salad leaves.
A straightforward picked-crab salad from the era when blue crabs came by the dozen and mayonnaise was made at home. Two things need attention: how much meat a dozen crabs actually gives, and how long they should really boil.
- Half a pint of dressingOne cup of mayonnaise. That is generous for the meat from a dozen crabs; hold some back and add it at the table rather than drowning the meat, which is the usual fate of this salad.
- A dozen crabs, in weightBlue crabs of eating size yield roughly 1 to 1.5 oz of picked meat each, so a dozen gives somewhere around three-quarters of a pound to a pound. If you are buying picked meat instead, a pound of lump or backfin substitutes directly and saves a good deal of picking.
- Twenty minutes is longHard-shell crabs of average size need about 10-12 minutes in hard-boiling salted water, or 15 for very large ones. Twenty minutes will not ruin them but it firms and dries the meat. Steaming over an inch of water gives better texture than full immersion.
- Salt the waterThe original does not mention it. Use enough salt that the water tastes clearly of the sea, or crab meat boiled in plain water comes out flat and no amount of dressing fixes it.
- "The fat which adheres to the shell"This is the yellowish-brown hepatopancreas, the mustard. It is rich and strongly flavoured and traditionally prized, but it is also where contaminants concentrate in crabs from industrial waters, and health advisories in several crabbing states recommend discarding it; if you keep it, use a little.
- Cool them fastLift the crabs into ice water as soon as they come off the heat. They stop cooking, the meat pulls from the shell more cleanly, and picking a hot crab is unpleasant work.
- Serving in the back shellScrub the top shells while the crabs cool and trim the ragged edge with scissors. Chill them before filling. This is presentation only; the recipe does not say how many shells to fill.
- YieldServes four to six as a first course, or four as a light lunch with bread. Dress it no more than an hour before serving; picked crab loosens and weeps once it sits in mayonnaise.
Crab salad of this kind belongs to the Atlantic seaboard, and specifically to the blue crab fisheries of the Chesapeake and the New Jersey and Long Island shores, where crabs were cheap enough in summer to be bought and boiled by the dozen. Cookbooks of the 1880s through the 1910s are full of such recipes, reflecting a fashion for cold composed dishes. Serving the dressed meat back in the scrubbed top shell is often said to have been a restaurant flourish of the day, related to the deviled crab then appearing on hotel menus; it survives, more or less unchanged, in crab houses along the same coast.