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of avocado pear (brushed with lemon juice to stop them blackening); this goes well with crab and mayonnaise. Hard-boil some eggs, cream the yolks with crab meat and a little mayonnaise, and fill the whites with this mixture. Try differently flavoured mayonnaise sauces.

Here is one version of an American mayonnaise, the main point of which is the chilli sauce. Sometimes finely chopped green pepper is included.

Crab Louis

Mix together the following ingredients:

Serves 6

mayonnaise, made with 2 egg yolks, 150 ml (5 fl oz) oil and the usual flavourings*

125 ml (4 fl oz) double cream, whipped

60 ml (2 fl oz) chilli sauce

2 tablespoons grated onion

2 tablespoons chopped parsley

dash of cayenne or Tabasco

1 teaspoon green pepper (optional)

extra lime or lemon juice

Arrange the crab meat on lettuce cover with the dressing and add the usual hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes and so on.

ACHILTIBUIE CRAB SOUFFLÉ

Mark Irvine’s Summer Isles Hotel, north-west of Ullapool in Scotland, is so far from the main road, along a single track, that he reckons it is a test of character for any guest arriving the first time. We certainly wondered where we were going to end up, the country would have seemed deserted if it had not been for the astonishing number of cars, even lorries, that we made way for. After 25 km (16 miles), we found ourselves on a narrowing tongue of land between beautiful pale sandy bays and turned left to Achiltibuie village and an hotel of reassuring comfort and warmth.

Sarah Irvine presides in the kitchen and has a much wider range of ingredients than you would think possible in such a place. She flavours her soufflés with crab bought from the fishermen in the village, or with her husband’s artichokes. He seems able to grow anything, either in his hydroponicum behind the hotel, or in plastic tunnels on the land which slopes down to the sea.

Serves 8–10

butter and dry crumbs for 2 soufflé dishes, or 8–10 individual dishes

90 g (3 oz) butter

60 g (2 oz) plain flour

450 ml (15 fl oz) milk

½ small bay leaf

100 g (3½ oz) grated onion

salt, pepper

1 tablespoon anchovy essence

2 teaspoons made English mustard

375 g (12 oz) crab meat

8 eggs, separated

Brush the dishes with soft butter and scatter with crumbs. Shake out the surplus.

Make up the soufflé base by melting the butter, stirring in the flour and cooking it gently for 2 minutes. Heat the milk and stir it in to make a smooth sauce. Add the bay leaf, onion and seasoning. Cook for about 20 minutes, tasting from time to time and removing the bay leaf before it becomes too dominant. Remove the pan from the heat and add the anchovy essence, mustard and crab meat. Beat in the egg yolks. Whisk the whites until stiff and fold them in, a little at first to slacken the mixture.

Divide the mixture between the dishes. Bake the larger soufflés at gas 6, 200 °C (400 °F) for 12–15 minutes, the smaller ones for 7-9 minutes. Serve immediately.

VARIATION Instead of crab, use the cooked and sieved bases of 8 artichokes, and use crumbled dry Stilton to flavour the sauce rather than anchovy and mustard. Allow about 175 g (6 oz), but add it to taste.

BRETON CRAB SOUP

One evening in 1884, Edmond de Goncourt and Emile Zola were invited to dinner by their publisher, Charpentier. It was so delicious that de Goncourt wondered if Charpentier was about to abscond with the cash, and became slightly nervous about the money owing on his novel Chérie. The star turn was crab soup, a Breton dish little known in Paris at that time. It was like a shellfish bisque, but ‘with something finer to it, something tastier, something more of the ocean’.

2 medium-sized cooked crabs

1 carrot, sliced

1 onion stuck with 3 cloves

bouquet garni

250 ml (8 fl oz) dry white wine, preferably Muscadet

fish, veal or chicken stock

150 g (5 oz) rice

up to 150 ml (5 fl oz) single cream

salt, pepper, cayenne

Remove the meat from the cooked crabs and set it aside. Put all the