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Crab Meat, Suedoise
Place one and a half pounds crab-meat flakes in a bowl. Season with four tablespoons dressing; gently mix. Place six fine, well cleaned and drained large lettuce leaves on a large cold dish, then divide the crab meat on the lettuce. Spread a mayonnaise sauce over meat, sprinkle over a finely chopped, hard-boiled egg and half teaspoon finely chopped parsley. Twist six small anchovies in oil, ring-like, and arrange one on top of each and serve.
A cold composed salad that lives or dies on the quality of the crab. Nothing is cooked here, so every component has to be right before it goes on the plate.
- "Dressing" means vinaigrettedressing here appears to be a plain oil-and-vinegar French dressing, not the mayonnaise, which is called for separately a line later. Something in the region of three parts oil to one of vinegar with salt and pepper; four tablespoons is enough to season a pound and a half of crab without soaking it.
- Crab meat flakesFlake or backfin lump crab suits the dish, though the recipe names no species. A pound and a half of picked meat is what you want in the bowl, so buy accordingly; pasteurized tub crab works, but drain it well and pick it over for shell and cartilage.
- Mix gently, and mean itThe whole point of buying flake meat is intact pieces. Fold the dressing in with a rubber spatula or your fingers, two or three turns, and stop.
- The mayonnaiseA period kitchen made this with raw yolks. If you are making it from scratch and serving it cold to anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, use pasteurized eggs; otherwise a good jarred mayonnaise thinned with a little lemon juice spreads more evenly over the mound anyway.
- AnchoviesOil-packed fillets, blotted, curled into a ring and set on top of each portion. Salt-packed anchovies need rinsing and filleting first. If the fillets are stiff and want to break, leave them in warm water for a minute and they will coil.
- Serve genuinely cold"A large cold dish" is an instruction, not a flourish. Chill the platter and the crab; dressed crab sitting at room temperature loses its texture and its sweetness within the hour.
- YieldSix lettuce leaves, six anchovies: six servings as a first course or a light lunch, about four ounces of crab each.
Suédoise is French kitchen shorthand for "in the Swedish style," a label attached in the classical repertoire to a range of preparations — often apple, beetroot or horseradish, as in sauce suédoise, though it can also mark a cold dish finished with anchovy or hard-boiled egg — a French cook's compressed idea of the Swedish cold table. The pairing of shellfish, egg, dill or parsley and cured anchovy is genuinely at home in Scandinavian cold cookery, though the mayonnaise-mounded lettuce leaf is pure turn-of-the-century hotel dining room. Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, built The International Cook Book around exactly this sort of borrowing: a national label attached to a dish assembled by a French-trained brigade for American guests, with the local crab standing in for whatever the name implied.