She used to call me “skunk” because, like a lot of 7-year old boys of my generation, I ran around in the summertime with no shoes and no shirt and sweated and played baseball on dusty fields and chased frogs through muddy creeks so that by mid-afternoon I bore an aroma similar to rust.
That was my dear aunt, Titter (kid talk for “sister” in the South). She was my dad’s older sibling and my favorite relative. After I more or less grew up I would occasionally go over to her house with a couple of T-bones and a bottle of good whiskey and we’d sit on the front porch and ridicule members of Congress over drinks. She was a superb cook. I think the foods she prepared must have shared their inmost secrets with her. I certainly learned a lot about making food from her, including the following plan for Crab Louis.
The Elegant Charm of Crab Louis
Where this thing got started is anybody’s guess. But …
It was 1904; Baseball Hall of Fame great, Cy Young, pitched the first perfect game in American League history, children’s book author, Dr. Seuss was born, the first Rolls-Royce automobile was manufactured by Charles Rolls and Henry Royce, Scott Joplin published sixteen of his greatest ragtime hits. It was also the year that the Russo-Japanese War began, construction started on the Panama Canal, Manhattan gave its name to Times Square and an obscure chef in Portland, Oregon, invented the splendid crab salad we know today as Crab Louis.
Or so the story goes. It might have been in San Fransisco in 1910 or maybe it was in Spokane in 1914 or possibly Portland in 1917. The origin of Crab Louis is lost in the fog of claim and counter claim. There is little doubt however that Crab Louis started out somewhere on the west coast, most likely in Oregon or Washington owing to the wealth there of Dungeness crabs which were the main ingredient of the original. It’s a fine-eatin’ crab, by the way.
Regardless of all that, Crab Louis has to be near the top of the list for any lover of really good seafood. One bite and I was a believer. It remains the one thing I can put in front of dinner guests that will never fail either as a side salad or as a main dish.
Some have claimed that Crab Louis was named after the French king Louis XIV and that it may originally was a version of Salade Nicoise, named for the city of Nice (“neese”). But Salad Nicoise was and is based on fresh tuna, not crab. The State of Louisiana is named for King Louis, whose appetite was said to be huge and required only the finest foods available, prepared and served by over 300 servants. He was particularly fond of salads which he reportedly preferred to eat with his hands. Whether Crab Louis was named for him we’ll leave to wiser souls.
Incidentally, Nice has a long association with seafood. Archaeological evidence from the area indicates that humans were making fire and cooking there some 230,000 years ago which is 226,500 years before the Greeks invented Prometheus, the god who purportedly brought fire to mankind thus enabling folks to actually cook the stuff they previously just ate raw. Like crabs.
More than just a great taste. In fact a lot more. Just 3.5 ounces of crabmeat contains a whopping 479 percent of your recommended daily requirement of vitamin B-12, plus 131 percent of copper, 72 percent of selenium and 69 percent of zinc. That’s packing quite a nutritional punch.
You Can do this:
Stir the following into a bowl:
1 Half-cup sour cream
2 Three-fourths cup mayonnaise
3. One tablespoon horseradish
4. Two very finely chopped green onions
5. Three sprigs very finely chopped fresh parsley
6. Ten shakes of Tabasco
7. Two heaping tablespoons Heinz Chili Sauce
8. Juice of one half lemon
Then gently fold in one pound of pre-cooked, lump crabmeat and mound this atop fresh, iceberg lettuce leaves and garnish with wedges of tomato and avocado.
Titter made her own mayonnaise for this dish, using egg yolks and vinegar whipped to a froth by hand in an ancient glass cylinder that had the recipe embossed on it. But any regular mayonnaise will do. Stay away from salad dressing mayonnaise or spicy mayonnaise. (Incidentally, Tabasco enhances the flavor of crabmeat).
Few things in life are certain but here’s one that is: Louis XIV and his 300 servants never got to enjoy fried catfish and hush puppies or buttermilk biscuits, shrimp n’ grits or steamed crawfish, duck and sausage gumbo, dirty rice and Dixie beer. Those are among the culinary crown jewels in the very state which is named after him and, being the hungry guy that he was, it’s my belief that he would have relished them all.
Close encounters of the painful kind.
One of the first lessons you learn about crabs in the surf is that you don’t pick them from the front. Among subsequent lessons are that you can’t move your foot faster than a mad crab can latch onto it and when one does latch on it will tend to not let go. The popular Atlantic blue crab is one of the most aggressive creatures on Planet Earth and you can be thankful that they aren’t as big as dogs and weigh 150 pounds.
Here’s a little crab lore
There are thousands of varieties of crabs around the world but the ones most prized for their flavor include the Atlantic Blue, Dungeness, Alaska king and the Florida stone crab. One of the oddest is the Japanese Spider Crab, the largest of all crabs, growing to a weight of 40 pounds. They can live to be 100 and are big enough to pose a threat to humans.
The misnamed Horseshoe Crab is actually not a true crab but is related to spiders and scorpions and has existed on Earth since before the time of the dinosaurs. One thing which makes these creatures so interesting is their brightly colored blue blood which, of all things, is used in the manufacture of life-saving anti-bacterial medicines to fight diseases such as meningitis. This blood is priced as high as $60,000 per gallon and is exploited by the pharmaceutical industry with little regard for the creatures who make it or for their continued ecological viability. However, these companies may soon switch to a synthetic replacement and the horseshoes may thus continue for another 200 million years.
The constellation of Cancer is known as The Crab and it occupies one of the twelve, 30-degree segments of the wheel of the Zodiak, which was invented in Babylon about 4,000 years ago and which you can see represented in the pages of today’s newspapers and tabloids for those 4,000-year old minds still in our midst. Ancient astronomers imagined that the stars making up that constellation resembled the claws of a crab and so they named it that. Astrologers consider it a “water sign” and believe those born when that “sign” is ascendant in the sky to have certain personality traits. Old Louis XIV, by the way, qualifies as one influenced by the “sign” of Virgo. (Don’t ask me.)
“It’s palpable hogwash,” as Titter called it, handing me her bourbon glass, “needs a refill.”