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Crab Salad
6 oz. tin crab meat to every pound of potatoes. 4 tins of crab meat, 4 pounds of potatoes diced, 1 stalk celery diced. Mix with French dressing.
— Mrs. Fred Churchill
A church-supper salad written in shorthand for cooks who already knew the drill: this is a potato salad stretched with crab, not the other way round. A few things the original assumes.
- The potatoes are cookedNothing in the text says so, but they must be cooked before dicing; boiling until just tender, then peeling and dicing, is the usual handling. Dressing them while still warm helps them take up the vinegar; chill before serving.
- "1 stalk celery"In books of this vintage "stalk" was often used for the whole head rather than a single rib, though usage varied. For four pounds of potatoes, four or five ribs diced fine is a reasonable reading.
- French dressing, 1900s senseNot the sweet orange bottled dressing. It means oil and vinegar beaten together, roughly three to one, with salt and pepper and often a little dry mustard or paprika. Figure about a cup and a half for this quantity.
- Canned crabSix-ounce tins are still a common size. Turn the meat out and run your fingers through it for shell and cartilage. Refrigerated pasteurised crab in tubs also works here.
- Fold, do not stirDress the potatoes and celery first, then fold the crab through at the end so the lumps stay whole rather than shredding into the potato.
- SeasoningNo salt is specified. Potatoes and canned crab both need it; taste after chilling, since cold dulls both salt and acid.
- YieldFour pounds of potatoes plus four tins of crab serves twelve to sixteen as a side. The stated ratio of one 6 oz. tin per pound of potatoes scales down cleanly.
Philathea cook books were compiled by the young women's Bible classes of the Baraca-Philathea movement, which spread through North American Protestant churches in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the recipes were collected by name from members — hence Mrs. Fred Churchill's contribution, given in a clipped, quantity-first style. The proportions here tell their own story: canned crab appears at a church supper, but stretched pound for pound with potato. "French dressing" in a book of this vintage means simply a vinaigrette, the plain oil-and-vinegar alternative to the boiled or mayonnaise dressings often found in American salad chapters of the era.