The Chinese cook a great crab dish. They chop the creature into four pieces—two claws, and the body split in half—and then throw it into hot oil with spring onions, ginger, soy sauce, and garlic. It is a complete mess when it arrives at the table but, as messes go, I know of no other I’d rather clear up. The Chinese also cook crab with chillies and black beans; equally tasty, equally finger-licking good.
If you are cooking crabs to pick out the meat afterward to use in a particular dish, then always choose large cock crabs as opposed to hens. The female crab is generally smaller but to distinguish between the two, if you are unsure, examine the flap on the underside; the female’s is broader. More importantly, make sure that your chosen crab is heavy for its size; this indicates that there is plenty of meat inside and that the crab has grown to fill its shell.
I would boil a 4-lb crab for 20–25 minutes. (Cut the time by half for half the weight, and so on.) The water should be well salted. In his marvelous book English Seafood Cookery, Ricky Stein suggests water salted in the proportions of 5½ oz to 1 gallon. He says that this is roughly the salinity of sea water, in which he normally cooks his shellfish. He would. He has a plentiful supply just across the street from his restaurant, The Seafood, in Padstow. To simulate sea water, I would suggest using Maldon sea salt and a pinch of sugar.
Sometimes a crab will shed its claws as soon as it is put into boiling water. To prevent this happening, a practical and humane method of killing a crab is to insert a strong, sharp knife straight through the middle of the body underneath the flap. This severs the central nervous system and removes all tension. One final important step is to have ready a large container of iced water in which to plunge the crab the minute it comes out of the boiling water. This immediately stops the crab cooking and ensures noticeably moist flesh.
There is a surprisingly large amount of meat in a good weighty crab. It takes time and trouble to prise it out of every nook and cranny, but it is worth it if you like crab as much as I do. One way to prevent it seeming too tedious is to pick and eat at the same time, with a generous pot of mayonnaise on the side. This makes for an occasion that involves energetic participation with everybody wielding picks and claw busters.
This dish uses mainly white crab meat with a small amount of sauce made from the brown meat. It is not really possible to take just a little of the brown meat to make the sauce, as all the ingredients that go with it have to be pulverized in the blender. I get very cross when I read recipes that ask you to blend together ridiculously scant quantities. If you’ve tried it, you will know that what happens is all the ingredients end up splattered against the sides of the blender. In this case, any sauce left over could either be turned into a mousse, set with a little gelatin, or added to soup made from the broken-up crab shell.
white meat from a cooked 3–4-lb crab
1 tbsp chopped mixed herbs, to include dill, tarragon, chives, parsley, and chervil
juice of ½ lemon
a pinch of cayenne
2 tbsp olive oil
salt
brown meat from a cooked 3–4-lb crab
1 tbsp ketchup
½ tbsp smooth Dijon mustard
½ tbsp horseradish sauce
juice of ½ lemon
1 tsp anchovy paste
2 tsp Cognac
salt and pepper
2 tbsp olive oil
Mix the white crab meat with the herbs, lemon, cayenne, and oil. Season to taste. In a blender, purée together all the sauce ingredients, except the olive oil, and pass through a fine sieve. Depending on the “wetness” of the brown meat, it may be necessary to thin the sauce with a little water. The ideal consistency should be like salad cream.
If you like neat plates of food, then divide the white crab meat into four portions and place in the middle of four plates, forming into circles with the help of a pastry cutter. Spoon the sauce in a swirl around the crab, and drizzle it with the olive oil. If you prefer less structured food, then serve the white meat in a bowl and the sauce separately.
The combination of tomato, garlic, and saffron with any shellfish is a good one. When set into a rich egg custard tart, it is truly sublime. Crab works extremely well here, though any other sort of shellfish, or a mixture, can be most successful.
1 small can (approx. 14.5 oz) of Italian plum tomatoes, chopped
2 garlic cloves, peeled and chopped
1 bay leaf
1 small thyme sprig
salt and pepper
8-inch cooked pastry shell (see here)
1 cup heavy cream
½ tsp saffron threads
4 egg yolks
white meat, plus a little of the brown, from a 2-lb cooked cock crab
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Put the tomatoes, garlic, herbs, and seasoning in a saucepan and reduce to a thickish sauce. Cool, remove the herbs, and spread the sauce in the bottom of the pastry shell. Warm together 3 tbsp of the cream with the saffron and allow to steep for a few minutes. Beat together the egg yolks and the rest of the cream and add the saffron cream. Season. Loosely fold the crab into the custard and carefully pour into the tart shell. Bake in the oven for 30–40 minutes or until set and pale golden brown. Serve warm, rather than hot from the oven.