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Crab Salad
Boil three dozen hard-shell crabs for one-half hour, and when they are cool, remove the top shell and tail of each. Divide what remains into four pieces, and with a nut-pick take out the meat, removing that contained in the large claws and the fat that clings to the top shell. Cut up an amount of celery equal to the crab meat, and mix both together; wetting with a few spoons of plain salad dressing. Place the mixture in the salad bowl, pour over the top a mayonnaise dressing, and garnish with crab claws and hard boiled eggs in alternation with tufts of green, such as parsley, the leaves of the celery, etc. Canned crabs make very good salad. If there is any oil in the can, drain it off before using the crabs, sprinkle the latter well with salt and vinegar, and drain again before adding the dressing.
A straightforward crab-and-celery salad that assumes you are picking three dozen crabs by hand — an afternoon's work for a household, and a quantity worth scaling before you start.
- YieldThree dozen hard-shell crabs, if they are blue crabs of average size, pick out to something like 2 to 3 lb of meat, depending on the crabs. For four people, figure roughly a dozen crabs, with an equal volume of celery.
- Boiling timeHalf an hour is far longer than blue crabs need and leaves the meat stringy and dry. Twelve to fifteen minutes in hard-boiling salted water is standard now, timed from the moment the water returns to the boil.
- CleaningThe recipe skips the gills. After the top shell and apron come off, pull away the feathery grey gills on each side before quartering the body; they are unpleasant in texture and are always discarded.
- The fat in the top shellThis is the hepatopancreas, still called mustard or tomalley. It carries a strong flavour many people like, but it is also where crabs concentrate contaminants, and most current advice is to leave it out rather than fold it into a salad.
- Plain salad dressingThe recipe does not say what this is; most likely a simple oil-and-vinegar dressing rather than a cooked boiled one. It is used here only to moisten and season the crab and celery before the thicker mayonnaise goes over the top.
- MayonnaiseHomemade mayonnaise of the period is raw yolk and oil. If you are making your own for a cold dish that will sit out, use pasteurized eggs, keep the salad refrigerated, and dress it as close to serving as possible.
- Nut-pickA slim pointed pick sold with nutcrackers for getting nut meats out at table. A cocktail fork, a lobster pick or a skewer does the same job.
- Canned crabModern canned or pasteurized tub crab is packed in its own liquor rather than oil, so the drain-salt-vinegar treatment is unnecessary. Drain it, pick through for shell fragments, and dress it lightly.
Crab salad belongs to the great age of American cold luncheon dishes, when mayonnaise-bound salads of chicken, lobster, shrimp and crab were the standard centerpiece of a ladies' lunch or a summer supper. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, aimed its cook book at middle-class households running without much kitchen help, which is why the instructions dwell on the mechanics of picking crabs and on the canned substitute, an acknowledgment that not every reader lived within reach of the Chesapeake or the Gulf. Commercially canned crab meat was widely available by the turn of the twentieth century, and cookbooks of the period sometimes appear to have offered it as an honest alternative rather than a compromise. The garnish of claws, quartered hard-boiled egg and tufts of parsley arranged in alternation reflects the era's taste for salads built up and decorated in the bowl rather than simply tossed.