A Bicoastal Approach to Crab Salad

One memorable crab salad is the war horse from San Francisco known as crab Louie. It used to be featured at all the old fish restaurants, but now is seldom seen, except for the most touristy places, where it is usually served with frozen crab meat. At its best, the salad is a chilled and splendid thing, the crab bathed with Louie dressing (somewhat pinkish and tangy like Thousand Island), then perched on a bed of crisp greens along with a little avocado, hard-cooked egg and, for whatever reason, canned white asparagus. Though the dish is now considered dated, a good version can be a lovely thing.

Because it is Dungeness crab season on the West Coast, the crab Louie comes to mind. But I’m in New York and I can’t quite bring myself to make one. It seems I want a crab salad that feels a little more Italian, or at least I want Italianate winter chicories like radicchio, treviso and endive instead of the more traditional chopped romaine.

And because I don’t want it to be mayonnaise-y, I’ve tinkered with an old-fashioned boiled dressing. Boiled dressing (it’s actually cooked over a double boiler) originated in the American South, where ingenious cooks figured out how to make a thick eggy salad sauce without oil. Typically this kind of salad dressing contains a fair amount of vinegar and mustard, which is fine, but it usually has sugar and a little flour, too, which I don’t think are necessary. I whisk egg yolks, cream, mustard, lemon juice, vinegar and just a touch of olive oil to a rich sabayon-like consistency.

I coat East Coast jumbo lump crab meat with the dressing, add chopped celery along with the chicory greens and — I can’t resist — paper-thin slivers of Meyer lemon from, well, California.

The result is a marvelously tasty if somewhat hybrid dish that deserves a new name. Maybe insalata Luigi?

Fish & Seafood with Bill & Sheila
_____________________________________________________________________
If you require a high quality printout of this article, just click on the printer symbol next to ’Share and enjoy’, and we will do the rest. This site is hosted by (click on the graphic for more information)

Return from crab to Home Page

If you want to increase your site popularity and gain thousands of visitors – check out these sites THEY ARE FREE. Spanishchef more than doubled its ‘New Visitors’ last month simply by signing up to these sites:




Follow spanishchef.net on TWITTER