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Crab Salad
Take the meat from the shells and claws of a dozen small crabs, season with salt and pepper, and add three tablespoonfuls of vinegar, two tablespoonfuls of sweet oil, and a little chopped parsley. Decorate the bowl with lettuce leaves, six stoned olives, twelve capers, and two hard-boiled eggs cut into quarters. It is then ready to be served.
A plain oil-and-vinegar crab salad from Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf kitchen, dressed in the bowl rather than tossed in advance. The only real decisions are the crab and the ratio of the dressing.
- A dozen small crabsOscar means whole hard-shell crabs picked by hand, likely blue crabs, which yield roughly 1 to 1.5 oz of meat each. Substitute about 1 lb of picked lump or backfin crabmeat and pick through it for shell fragments and cartilage.
- The dressing ratioThree tablespoons vinegar to two of oil is sharper than most modern vinaigrettes, where the oil usually dominates, often around three to one. Taste it against the crab and expect to add oil; the acid will otherwise flatten the sweetness that is the whole point of the meat.
- Sweet oilPeriod shorthand for edible olive oil, the "sweet" distinguishing fresh, mild oil from rancid. A mild oil serves better here than a peppery green one.
- Dress at the last momentVinegar firms and dulls crabmeat if it sits. Season, dress and serve within a few minutes, and keep everything cold until then.
- Handle the meat gentlyFold rather than stir. Lump crab breaks into shreds under a spoon, and shredded crab in a sharp dressing reads as a paste rather than a salad.
- Stoned olives and capers"Stoned" is pitted. Rinse brined capers and drain them well so they do not add a third source of acid to an already sharp bowl.
- YieldA pound of crabmeat with the garnish gives four first-course servings, or two as a light lunch.
- Food safetyCooked crabmeat, whether picked at home or bought, is a chilled ready-to-eat food. Keep it refrigerated, and if using pasteurized tub meat, open it the day you serve it.
Oscar Tschirky presided over the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893 and published The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf in 1896, a fat compendium of some nine hundred pages aimed as much at the household cook as at the hotel kitchen. Salads of this kind, meat lightly dressed with oil and vinegar and then framed with lettuce, olives, capers and quartered eggs, appear frequently in American hotel cookery of the 1890s; mayonnaise-bound seafood salads became more prominent in the decades that followed. The garnish is doing much of the work here, and the counts of six olives and twelve capers are given precisely. Blue crab was abundant along the Atlantic coast at the time, and "a dozen small crabs" reads as a modest purchase rather than a luxury one.