One of my favourite ways to eat crab is as part of a seafood paella or crab couscous. But then again, if you have enough quantity of nice big pieces of white crab meat then you can’t really beat a crab doorstep sandwich. When I go to the fishmongers stall at Romford market, there is usually a choice between some huge Cornish edible crabs at about £13.50 each, cooked but undressed, or the little Cromer crabs dressed and packaged for £2.50 or £3.00. Some of the dressed crab has been frozen though, and the compulsory ingredients listing reveals that potato starch has been added to the brown crab meat. You don’t get much white. The undressed crab, on the other hand takes about half an hour or so of work to extract all of the crab meat from the various body parts including legs claws and those peculiar cavities they have withing the main body shell.
This article titled “Consider the crab” was written by Oliver Thring, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 8th February 2011 09.30 UTC If ever humankind so destroys this smogged and wheezing world that we have to colonise a new planet, and find one, and settle there, we might be surprised to find crabs waiting to meet us. Something about the decapod form seems especially well suited to survival, and crabs have evolved independently and repeatedly for millions of years. The 4,500-odd species of crab are superbly adapted for a multitude of habitats. They live in tropical and sub-tropical lands and in every sea in the world except the Antarctic, though even that could soon change. They range from the oyster crab, smaller than a pea, to the Japanese spider crab whose leg span can reach almost four metres. Some of the most lumpen ones are coconut crabs, named for their ability to crack coconuts with their pincers and which live on coastal lands from Kenya to the south Pacific, climbing trees and stealing pans from kitchens. Crabs feature in the cooking of every territory they occupy, scuttling their way into woks and casseroles from here to Micronesia. The crab we know best in this country is Cancer pagarus, with the pedestrian pseudonym of “edible crab”. They’re useful because, like the delicious Dungeness crab of the Pacific northwest, you can eat the meat from both their claws and bodies. The word crab in fact descends from those claws, coming ultimately from the Indo-European root “gerbh”, meaning to scratch or carve. (A useful tip if ever a crab pinches your finger is to tickle its belly. This supposedly makes it release its grip but you’ll forgive me for not having tested it myself.) If a crab loses its claws it will die slowly of starvation, but if it loses one then, remarkably, it’ll grow another. That’s because all crabs – indeed all crustaceans – moult their exoskeletons as they grow, forming new and stretchier “cuticles” under the old ones and squeezing their way out. There’s a video of a giant spider crab moulting here, a deeply unsettling spectacle. A newly moulted crab fills itself with water and then slowly replaces that water with muscle. This has an important result in the kitchen: up to 50% of the weight of a recently moulted crab will be water, while an actively growing animal has much denser, sweeter flesh. Recently-moulted crabs are the stock-in-trade of the soft-shell industry: the best are the blue crabs from the eastern seaboard of the US and Canada, and you also get delicious ones from the Venetian lagoon. Preparing a soft-shell crab for the table is a rather brutal process, and in any case you’re unlikely to get them fresh in this country. Cleaned soft-shells freeze well, and that’s the only practical if pricey way of getting hold of them in this country. They’re delicious deep-fried in a simple batter but I like the look of Atul Kochhar’s recipe using mustard oil and serving them with a sweet chilli chutney. Female crabs tend to have more meat than males and the pregnant ones or “berried hens” supposedly have the best flavour of all, but the Marine Conservation Society says that pregnant females should never be caught. There is currently a dearth of information on European crab stocks and we can’t say whether they’re being overfished: “it will be several years before enough data is gathered to gain a good understanding of the trends in landings”, in the MCS’s words. But one advantage is that, unlike fish, crabs are always caught live, so immature ones can be thrown back into the sea until they’re big enough for the pot. One of my favourite recipes is crab with linguine, quick and easy as anything, and the European version of the chilli crab dishes ubiquitous in Singapore. According to Niki Segnit’s magisterial Flavour Thesaurus, apple, avocado and citrus are some of crab’s favourite companions, but I’m sure you have your own preferences. What’s your favourite way to eat a crab?
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
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