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Crab and Tomato Salad
Remove meat from hard-shelled crabs; there should be one cup. Add two-thirds cup celery, cut in small pieces, and six small tomatoes peeled, chilled, and cut in quarters. Moisten with Mayonnaise. Serve on lettuce leaves, and garnish with Mayonnaise, curled celery, and small pieces of tomato.
A cold composed salad that depends entirely on the quality of its three components, since nothing is cooked once the crab is picked. The proportions are the whole recipe; everything else is assembly.
- "Hard-shelled crabs"This distinguishes ordinary blue crabs from soft-shell crabs, which are the same animal caught just after moulting and eaten whole. Here you want picked meat only.
- How much crab to buyOne cup of picked crabmeat is roughly 5 to 6 ounces, which means about 3 pounds of whole live or cooked blue crabs. Refrigerated pasteurized lump crabmeat sold in tubs is a direct substitute, one 8-ounce container being slightly generous.
- Small tomatoesThe book gives no size, but a fruit of around 2 inches across, close to a modern Campari or small vine tomato, is a reasonable reading. Quartered cherry tomatoes will bleed less water and hold their shape better than quartered slicers.
- Peeled and chilledPeel by scoring the skins, dipping 15 seconds in boiling water and slipping them off, then chill thoroughly before cutting. Warm tomatoes weep and thin the mayonnaise into a pink slick.
- Curled celeryA standard Victorian garnish: cut celery into short lengths, slit each end into fine strips, and drop into ice water for an hour until the fringes curl back. It is decorative only and can be skipped.
- The mayonnaiseThe book intends its own hand-beaten mayonnaise, which is uncooked. If you make it from scratch, use pasteurized eggs, particularly for anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised; a good jarred mayonnaise thinned with a little lemon juice does the same job.
- Dress at the last momentCrab and celery both shed liquid under salt and acid. Fold everything together just before serving or the salad slumps.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the quantities suggest about four as a first course, or two as a light lunch.
This appears in the salad chapter of Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, first published in 1896, at a time when mayonnaise-dressed salads were fashionable in America. Chilled composed salads served on a lettuce leaf were a mark of a well-run late-Victorian table, and they depended on reliable ice for the icebox and on celery, which had become far more widely available than it had been earlier in the century. The crab would most likely have been an Atlantic species such as the blue crab. Farmer is remembered for specifying exact, level quantities -- one cup of crab, two-thirds cup of celery -- in contrast to the vaguer measures common in earlier cookbooks.