Broodje Krab

At a Dutch deli case the krabsalade sits in a tub beside the egg salad and the tuna, sold by the gram, pale pink and flecked with herb. In everyday snack-counter and supermarket form that crab is usually shredded surimi, a moulded fish paste dyed and shaped to mimic crab leg, bound in mayonnaise with maybe a little onion or dill. The bread is a neutral soft roll and barely a factor; the whole sandwich rises or falls on what is in that tub, which is why the honest move at the counter is to read the label and know which version you are buying.

Assembly takes seconds and a couple of small habits carry it. The roll is halved and sometimes buttered first, the butter sealing the crumb against a wet filling so the bread does not surrender to it. The salad is spooned in and pushed to both ends, because a roll left bare at the tips gives a first and last bite of plain bread, and a leaf of lettuce or a few cucumber rings goes in for crunch and to stop the loose salad sliding out the side. Quality then lives in the filling and the freshness: a good krabsalade tastes clean and faintly marine rather than merely sweet and starchy, the mayonnaise binding the shreds and not drowning them, in a roll fresh enough to hold without turning gummy. A poor one is a grey over-sweet paste, mayonnaise pooling at the bottom, the bread gone damp and slack from sitting too long under the load.

It eats cool and soft and mild. The roll gives, the cold creamy salad follows, a small crunch of cucumber or lettuce breaks it up, and there is a faint sweetness with a whisper of the sea if the salad is any good. There is no aroma to speak of and no warmth; it is undemanding lunchroom food, eaten at a counter with a coffee without much thought. Done well the bite is genuinely clean and pleasant; done badly it is bland and claggy, the mayonnaise sitting heavy and the crumb damp under it.

The variation runs along a quality line rather than a recipe. At the top end this is genuine white and brown crab meat, dressed lightly and barely seasoned so the meat itself speaks, the roll you might find at a fishmonger or a good café. At the everyday end it is the surimi krabsalade from the deli case, cheaper and sweeter and softer. A squeeze of lemon, a little dill, or a few capers sharpens either one without changing the method. The same neutral roll carries shrimp salad, smoked salmon, or any number of cold fillings; the Dutch fish-roll tradition runs deep and goes its own way around it.

Calling it a crab roll when it usually holds none is a convention rather than a fraud, the same way "crab stick" is understood everywhere to mean fish shaped like crab. A soft roll closed around a bound salad is a sandwich by any reading, and a good one when the salad is fresh; it just asks you to know whether the tub it came from was picked from a shell or pressed from white fish. The label settles it, and the price usually agrees with the label.

The Crab That Arrived in 1974

The roll itself has no origin worth chasing, but the thing inside it does, and the date is surprisingly precise. The crab in most of these sandwiches is surimi, a documented twentieth-century product rather than an old one. The Japanese company Sugiyo first produced and patented imitation crab from fish paste in 1974, marketed as kanikama, a contraction of kani, crab, and kamaboko, the cured fish cake it is built from.

From there it spread fast. In 1977 a San Francisco firm working with Sugiyo introduced the product internationally, and within a decade the dyed, shaped, crab-flavoured fish stick had reached deli cases across Asia, Europe, and North America, including the Dutch ones where the krabsalade tub now lives. The bread and the mayonnaise are old ideas; the "crab" that defines the everyday roll is a piece of 1970s Japanese food engineering, younger than it sounds.

Real crab has been picked and eaten for as long as people have lived near cold coasts, but the pink shredded salad most Dutch eaters mean by krab traces to a single patented invention in Ishikawa in 1974, dressed up since with mayonnaise and a soft roll and a name borrowed from the animal it imitates.