Crab Louie. Photo by Maggie Heyn Richardson
Classic Crab Louie Salad is a fast and easy way to celebrate the season
The blue crab harvest is fully underway here in south Louisiana, and many friends I talked to over the weekend were planning Labor Day crab boils. Yum!
As much as I love crawfish, shrimp and oysters, I admit crab is my favorite local seafood. We picked up a couple dozen boiled crabs from Tony’s Seafood for our family of five, and they couldn’t have been tastier.
Traditionalists say if you harvest crabs after a full moon, they’re at their fullest, so I guess we were still benefitting from the full moon a week earlier. At any rate, we found ourselves unable to finish the haul, so with the freshly picked sweet meat, I made Crab Louie the next day—one of the easiest and tastiest uses for crabmeat around.
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The dish hails from San Francisco, another crab-obsessed locale, where it has reportedly been enjoyed since 1915. Louie sauce is not unlike our remoulade sauce in that it’s creamy, tangy and served over cold seafood. But unlike remoulade, Louie sauce contains no mustard.
This is a recipe I’ve been making regularly since it appeared in a special San Francisco issue of now-defunct Gourmet magazine. It’s fast and easy, and a great way to highlight local crabmeat. Enjoy!
Crab Louie
Serves 4
To make the dressing, whisk the following:
1 cup mayonnaise
¼ cup ketchup-based chili sauce
¼ cup minced scallion (both white and green parts)
2 tablespoons minced green olives
2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon bottled horseradish
Salt and pepper to taste
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Divide evenly among four plates:
Shredded iceberg lettuce
24 ounces jumbo lump crabmeat, free of shell fragments
Arrange crabmeat over lettuce. Pour dressing over crabmeat and garnish with capers, tomatoes, wedges of hard-boiled egg and lemon.
Maggie Heyn Richardson is a regular 225 contributor and the author of the new book, Hungry for Louisiana, An Omnivore’s Journey, which explores eight of Louisiana’s most emblematic foods, including crawfish. Reach her through her website, hungryforlouisiana.com and follow her on Twitter@mhrwriter.