Crab Imperial with Crostini

August again and the salmon are everywhere — in the rivers, in the grocery stores, in the coolers that my ER colleagues bring to work because someone's uncle or buddy or neighbor caught too many reds on the Kenai and the surplus has to go somewhere. Alaska in August is a state swimming in salmon, literally and figuratively, and the abundance feels almost reckless after the scarcity of winter.

I dedicated this week to Reynaldo's salmon recipes — all of them, documented and photographed and written up for the blog. His salmon sinigang, of course, the masterpiece. But also his simpler preparations: salmon pan-fried with garlic and ginger. Salmon steamed with soy sauce and green onions, a technique he learned from a Chinese coworker at the hospital. Salmon dried in strips like tapa — Filipino dried meat — because Reynaldo once said that if you can make tapa from beef, you can make it from salmon, and he was right, the dried salmon smoky and salty and chewy in a way that felt ancient even though Reynaldo invented it in a kitchen in Mountain View.

The salmon tapa was the surprise. I'd never made it before — Lourdes doesn't make it, says it's "Reynaldo's thing" with the particular possessiveness she applies to recipes that belong to the dead. But she told me how: thin-sliced salmon, cured in soy sauce, garlic, sugar, and vinegar, then dried slowly in a low oven. The result is concentrated fish — intense, jerky-like, the flavor compacted by the drying the way memory is compacted by time.

I wrote a blog post about it: "Salmon Tapa: My Father's Invention in a State Full of Fish." The post is about Reynaldo's resourcefulness — the way he looked at Alaska's abundance and filtered it through Filipino technique, creating something new from two old traditions. The way immigrants cook is the way immigrants live: they take what's available and make it their own, and the result is neither fully the old country nor fully the new one but something in between, something that couldn't exist anywhere else.

The post resonated. People wrote in about their own parents' inventions — the recipes that exist nowhere except one kitchen, made by one person, for one family. A woman in Seattle described her mother's Korean kimchi made with Alaskan cabbage. A man in Texas described his grandmother's Mexican tamales made with venison. We are all carrying recipes that can't be found in any cookbook, recipes that exist because someone loved a place enough to cook in it and loved a homeland enough to cook from it. The kitchen is the border crossing. The food is the passport. The recipe is the story of how we got here.

After a week of salmon — tapa and sinigang and pan-fried and steamed — I wanted one more way to celebrate what Alaska puts on our doorstep, and I turned to the other thing this state does impossibly well: crab. Reynaldo would have approved; he believed in using what a place gives you, fully and gratefully, and Alaska gives crab with the same reckless generosity it gives salmon in August. This Crab Imperial with Crostini is rich and a little festive, the kind of dish you make when you’ve spent a week doing something meaningful and you want to mark the end of it with something that feels like a toast.

Prep Time: 15 minutes | Cook Time: 25 minutes | Total Time: 40 minutes | Servings: 8

Ingredients

1 lb lump crab meat, picked over for shells
1/3 cup mayonnaise
1 large egg yolk
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon Old Bay seasoning
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
2 tablespoons fresh flat-leaf parsley, finely chopped
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Salt to taste
1 French baguette, sliced into 1/2-inch rounds (about 24 slices)
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 garlic clove, peeled and halved
Paprika, for garnish
Lemon wedges, for serving

Instructions

Preheat the oven. Heat oven to 375°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside.
Make the crostini. Arrange baguette slices in a single layer on the prepared baking sheet. Brush both sides lightly with olive oil. Bake for 10–12 minutes, flipping once halfway through, until golden and crisp. While still warm, rub each slice with the cut side of the garlic clove. Set aside.
Mix the imperial filling. In a medium bowl, whisk together the mayonnaise, egg yolk, Dijon mustard, Worcestershire sauce, Old Bay, lemon juice, parsley, pepper, and a pinch of salt until smooth and well combined.
Fold in the crab. Add the lump crab meat to the bowl and fold gently with a rubber spatula, taking care to keep the large pieces of crab as intact as possible. Do not overmix.
Bake the imperial. Transfer the crab mixture into a lightly greased shallow baking dish or divide it evenly among individual ramekins. Dust the top lightly with paprika. Bake at 375°F for 18–22 minutes, until the top is lightly golden and the filling is set and heated through.
Serve immediately. Spoon the warm crab imperial onto crostini and arrange on a platter. Garnish with extra fresh parsley and serve with lemon wedges on the side.

Nutrition (per serving)

Crab Imperial with Crostini — When Alaska’s Abundance Calls for Something Celebratory