Crab Salad
1 Pint Crab Meat 2 Stalks Celery 1 Egg, hard boiled Lettuce 1 Tomato, chopped fine Salt, Pepper, Vinegar Mayonnaise Cut meat, celery, tomato and egg fine; season with salt, pepper and vinegar.
Stir in salad bowl, garnish with lettuce leaves and dress with the mayonnaise.
A plain icebox-era salad that depends almost entirely on the quality of the crab. The method is sound; the only real work is keeping the mixture from going watery.
- A pint of crab meatCrab was sold by volume from the picking house, and a pint of picked meat weighs roughly 1 lb. Lump or backfin gives the best texture; claw meat is cheaper and stronger in flavour.
- Do not cut the crab fineThe recipe directs that all four ingredients be cut fine. With modern lump crab, fold it in whole and chop only the celery, egg and tomato, then check for shell fragments before mixing.
- Seed the tomatoOne chopped tomato added whole will release enough liquid to thin the mayonnaise into a pink slick as the salad stands. Halve it, squeeze out the seeds and jelly, and dice only the flesh.
- Salt, pepper, vinegarNo quantities are given. Start with about a teaspoon of cider or white wine vinegar for a pint of crab, and salt lightly, tasting as you go.
- MayonnaiseMayonnaise of this period was typically made at home with raw yolks. Commercial jarred mayonnaise is made with pasteurised egg and acidified, and keeps; if you make your own, use pasteurised eggs and keep the salad cold.
- TemperatureEverything should go into the bowl cold and come out of the refrigerator only to be served. Crab held at room temperature loses sweetness quickly and should not be left out.
- YieldAbout four servings as a first course, or two as a lunch. The lettuce here is a garnish and a liner, not a bed to be mixed in.
Crab salads of this kind belong to the age of the icebox and the cheap crab pick. Along the Chesapeake and the Gulf, and in the fish markets of any coastal city, picked crab meat was sold by the pint through the summer months, and was both affordable and easy to buy. The construction — protein, celery, hard-boiled egg, bound with mayonnaise and set on lettuce leaves — is a standard American "bowl salad" formula of the period, applied interchangeably to chicken, lobster, salmon and shrimp. Commercially jarred mayonnaise reached American grocers in the 1910s, and by this period cookbooks commonly list "Mayonnaise" simply as an ingredient, as this one does.