West Indies Salad

Published 11:21 pm Tuesday, October 24, 2006

One of the most popular crabmeat recipes in the Gulf Coast region is West Indies Salad.

West Indies Salad, a cold hors d’oeuvre usually spooned onto crackers, is a simple combination of lump crabmeat, onion, vinegar, oil, salt and pepper. The dish was invented by the late restaurateur, Bill Bayley of Mobile, who has also been credited with the invention of fried crab claws. Bayley owned and operated Bayley’s Restaurant in Mobile which opened in the late 1940s.

Bayley, a former merchant marine and a figure straight out of central casting if Hollywood was looking for stereotypical Southern café owner of that era short, rotund, and never without a cigar, invented the dish while serving as a ship steward.

As the legend goes, while Bayley’s ship was docked in a faraway port, he purchased a sack of lobsters and returned to the ship where he boiled them and added ingredients that were available: oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper.

A few years later, when he opened his Mobile restaurant, he remembered that dish, and since fresh lobster wasn’t available in Lower Alabama, he substituted crabmeat. The port where he originally purchased the lobsters was in the West Indies, hence the name, West Indies Salad.

That is the story according to some accounts. Another version states that Bayley always liked the oil and vinegar-based onion-cucumber salad served in a lot of Southern seafood houses. He simply substituted crabmeat for cucumber and a legend was born.

I like the first version, and I’ll choose to believe that one. Some things just taste better when there’s an interesting story attached.

Whatever the origin, the salad put Bayley’s restaurant on the map. For years, the cigar-chomping restaurateur was asked to serve his specialty from Mobile to Montgomery to Washington, D.C. The restaurant closed for a period, but Bayley’s son, Bill Bayley Jr., reopened the historic establishment and has been doing great business ever since.

Last week I ate at Bayley’s restaurant. It’s a simple, but clean, porcelain-coated concrete block building on the Dauphin Island Parkway in a part of town called Bayley’s Corner. The original restaurant was located next door.

The West Indies Salad at Bayley’s is served by the pint ($12.95) or by the quart ($17.95) and arrives at the table in a large bowl to be shared, family style. My group of eight ordered a quart and had trouble eating all of it. It looked like a lot more than a quart — and I have no idea how they are making any profit serving that much crabmeat for that price.

There has been one change to the original recipe in that the dish was originally made with lump crabmeat. Today, Bayley uses claw meat — the darker, less attractive, less expensive alternative instead of the all white crabmeat.

Nevertheless, it tasted just like my mother’s West Indies Salad. She prepared hers from the Jubilee cookbook published by the Mobile Junior League.

Typically crabmeat, a delicate ingredient, is paired with similar delicate components. Not so with West Indies Salad. The crabmeat almost becomes a vessel to carry the onions and vinegar.

I was asked to speak on behalf of West Indies Salad at a recent Southern Foodways Symposium. I offered to bring a few gallons for all of the attendees to sample.

Linda Nance, Purple Parrot Café sous chef, and I played around with Bayley’s original recipe trying to update and possibly upgrade the dish. His recipe calls for Wesson oil. We used all types of exotic and expensive olive oils and flavored oils. The results were good, but not necessarily an improvement on the original.

Whereas the Bayley recipe called for cider vinegar, we also tried substituting boutique vinegars, to no avail. Ultimately we learned that if we wanted to serve West Indies Salad, we would need to follow the original recipe.

In an early cookbook, I published a recipe for a Crabmeat Martini which was served in one of my restaurants. It used West Indies Salad as the inspiration and added some of the more exotic components: white balsamic vinegar, lemon-flavored oil, and Absolut Citron Vodka.



Robert St.John is an author, chef,

restaurateur and world-class eater. He can be reached at www.robertstjohn.com.