Crab Sandwich
Take the contents of a small can of crab meat, squeeze out liquor; mix with a little mayonnaise dressing. Place a crisp lettuce leaf on each slice of lightly buttered white bread, and spread with crab mixture.
Put slices together and cut in squares.
A four-line sandwich that depends almost entirely on how well you dry the crab. Everything else is assembly.
- Squeezing out the liquorThis is the hinge. Canned crab carries a lot of packing liquid, and any left behind will turn the mayonnaise loose and soak the bread within minutes. Press the meat in a fine sieve or wring it in a clean towel until it feels barely damp.
- A small canCanned crab of this era was commonly sold in cans of around 6 oz, not far off the modern 6 oz can, yielding roughly three-quarters of a cup to a cup of drained meat. That is enough for four to six sandwiches, or a dozen or so of the small squares the recipe intends.
- Pick it overCanned crab, then and now, comes with slivers of shell and cartilage. Spread the drained meat on a plate and go through it with your fingers before dressing it.
- Mayonnaise dressingIn books of this period this generally meant a made-from-scratch emulsion of egg yolk, oil, and vinegar or lemon, often with mustard; thicker and sharper than jarred mayonnaise. Use "a little": just enough to bind, perhaps two tablespoons per cup of crab. An overdressed filling will slide out when cut.
- Lightly buttered breadThe butter is not for flavor so much as waterproofing. Spread it thinly but completely to the edges of soft-crumbed white sandwich bread, which is the closest modern equivalent to the fine-grained loaves these books assume.
- Cutting in squaresThe recipe calls for squares; trimming the crusts first is optional. Assemble no more than an hour ahead, keep chilled and covered with a damp cloth, and cut just before serving.
- Worth addingThe original is deliberately plain. A squeeze of lemon, a pinch of celery salt, or a little finely minced celery folded into the crab all sit within the idiom of the book and lift a filling that can otherwise read as flat.
Sandwich books like this one belong to a specific moment in American cooking: the two decades after 1900, when reliable canned goods reached ordinary pantries and the afternoon tea, the card party and the ladies' luncheon created steady demand for small, cold, tidy food. Canned crab meat made a delicacy that had been strictly local into something a cook in Illinois could open in January — which is precisely why the recipe begins with a can rather than a crab. The instruction to cut in squares is a social signal as much as a practical one; a sandwich cut small and crustless was understood to be for a tea table rather than a lunch pail. Recipes of this kind rarely name a quantity of dressing or a number of servings, though what readers were presumed to know, and why such details were left out, is a matter of inference rather than record.