Fire & Knives

There is a moment near the beginning of the movie 'Alien' when we catch the first glimpse of the creature they call the ‘Face Hugger’. It is the genius of HR Giger that the creature’s design quotes the legs of spiders, tails of scorpions, skeletal fingers and all manner of invasive phallic imagery. It is intended to provoke, in all who see it, a sense of unease, visceral disgust and revulsion.

It made me think of drawn butter.

Sure, it had acid for blood but, for me, the face hugger had all the flavour of a Japanese spider crab with the addition of that monumental, meter long tail. The mere thought of meter of lobster tail was enough to send me into paroxysms.

Crabs have always been close to my heart. I grew up in a drear seaside Necropolis and probably tasted my first dressed crab in a promenade shelter in horizontal drizzle; a smell of iodine in the air and the scouring lash of windblown sand against naked knees.

In my last years at school I had a job in a beachside shellfish shack dishing out whelks, cockles and appalling jellied eels to drunken holiday makers. I lived for the moment that a slightly classier tripper would ask for a dressed crab. After two long summers, I was adept. I could have the claws and legs off and split, the carapace cracked around the line of weakness, the dead man’s fingers whipped out and the meat shredded into a fluffy mass in less than two minutes – faster if I was drunk. It was the first job I’d had that had ever given me a feeling of achievement through a skill and, I’m sure, was responsible for my later food obsessions.

A while after graduation I moved to North Carolina, a state with an indecent obsession with crustaceans. Where your average English family will dine, al fresco, on paraffin flavoured rusk sausages and rare chicken, a family on the Outer Banks of NC will throw a crab crackin’.

The usual routine is to cover the big table on the porch with newspapers and drink beer while someone else drops at least a hundredweight of tiny sweet, blue crabs into a big drum of boiling seawater on the stove. Once they’re piping hot, they’re drained and poured into a mound in the middle of the table. Drawn (or clarified) butter, Tabasco and a revolting sounding but surprisingly delicious dressing made from equal quantities of horseradish and ketchup are the accompaniments. No one goes home feeling less than uncomfortable around the belt.

The Carolinas are also the spiritual home of the soft shell crab. Lets take a short diversion for a biology lesson. Crustaceans are...

‘...a mainly aquatic class of creatures, sharing with other arthropods, such as insects and arachnids, the characteristics of being invertebrates, with jointed limbs, segmented bodies and an exoskeleton of chitin’.

That hard exterior shell is obviously a bit of a challenge as the crab grows so, at various points during its life, it will shed it and lurk under rocks while its soft skin hardens to create a replacement. Shell shedding always takes place at full moon.

In this soft-shelled phase, the crab is what North Carolinians refer to as ‘good eating’ so, thousands of crabs are harvested and kept alive for weeks in darkened tanks under tarpaulins. Once they’ve waxed fat, a single, 60-watt light bulb is turned on under the tarp whereupon the poor, thick creatures, thinking it’s the full moon, disrobe within minutes.

Soft-shell crabs are delivered to the kitchen alive, in big flat trays, usually containing four or five dozen. They are a pleasant bluish slate colour with a more frilly and decorative edging than the little shore crabs we caught off the pier as kids. The new shell is already present, in all the right places but has the texture of a tough custard skin.

Southern hospitality demands a disorientating generosity of portions so there is little time to waste on fine surgery to remove inedible parts. The crab is pushed flat onto a board, the knife is inserted into the centre point of the back and two fast cuts are made, towards the front of the shell. The discarded wedge contains the eyes, mouthparts, most of the gill structure and a couple of other bits the locals consider unpalatable. The crab is then tossed in egg wash, seasoned flour, another egg wash and breadcrumbs before being deep-fried.

I once catered for some faction of the State Senate at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. Their restaurant kitchens were well equipped and we felt we’d staffed up well to handle a mere hundred, elderly Southern politicians, slurping juleps, boasting and munching the occasional canapé.

They had asked for the soft-shell crabs in advance and hadn’t really expressed much interest in anything else on the menu so we set to work, production-line style, chopping, dipping, coating and cycling through four separate fryers. The head waitress picked up the first heaped platter, raised it over her head with a flourish and strode through the swing-door onto the restaurant floor.

The susurration from the main room dipped in anticipation then there was an unearthly roar punctuated with heehawing jeers. Something thumped solidly against the swing door then the waitress stumbled back through it, shielding herself with the empty tray.

“They’re like animals” she choked, her face pale with shock.

We took strategic pause from serving until we had loaded every platter we had, then we formed up at the swing doors. I took point with two more cooks at my shoulders and the rest of the floor staff in a flying V.

I am not a small man. I flatter myself I have a certain commanding bearing. Bruce, on my right was a six-foot, hippie, mountain survivalist with an M16 in the gun rack of his truck, mean eyes and the best-kept knives in the kitchen. Jim, to my left, had played football for the state. I don’t understand the game, but he told me it was his job to stand at the front and get hit.

The senators had us beat from the get-go. We’d placed a buffet table at the opposite side of the room and it was our column’s objective to resupply it, but not one of us got through. One very small waitress managed to crawl between legs, nip out the front entrance and rejoin us in the kitchen later but the rest of us were just overrun by a whooping, slavering mob of crazed seniors, costly dental work flashing and manicured claws tearing.

We regrouped behind the swing door where we found the second wave of dinner had, quite reasonably, made a break for freedom. Four boxes worth were loose and squirreling themselves away in any sheltered corner.

We kept finding them for days afterwards. One or two ventured out from their hiding spots and surrendered, a few perished and had to be tracked by smell. One, however, found itself a home in an inaccessible space behind the walk-in and taunted us for a fortnight, popping up when least expected and waving his claws in a crabby V sign. We grew rather fond of the scrappy little survivor. When our Vietnamese KP finally ran him to ground, he assured us that both his shell and his claws had hardened and showed us cuts on his fingers in evidence.

Wherever later travels have taken me, I’ve always been drawn to local crustacean dishes. Crab cioppino, in San Francisco, though now regarded as a sad tourist bait can be splendid if approached with enough breezy Northern California positivity and cold Anchor Steam Beer. The lobster roll is worshipped by the otherwise phlegmatic Bostonians in a manner I can only find just. Anything the Thais do with their local crabs is worth the flight and Sydney should just blow up that Opera House and build an enormous shrine to the Balmain Bug.

Although everyone raves about their local lobsters, I find it hard to agree for one simple reason. Wherever you find good lobsters, you find better crabs. To me the crabs have always tasted less insipid and more importantly, are much less sought after. This means that the iniquities of pre-boiling, freezing, vacuum bagging or just indecently long, live-storage on ice are all visited on the premium lobster but not wasted on the proletarian crab.

While the boatman is trying to convince you that the timid, beaten, moribund, declawed zombie in the centre of his display was caught this morning, there’s something lashing in a bucket under the slab that’s just exploding with terrifying, scuttering vitality. I know which I’d rather eat.

And here’s my favourite way to eat them.

Proper Crab Cakes.

Crab cakes have long been a menu staple of diners on the Eastern Seaboard of the US and most of them are delicious. They have a lot in common with burgers, meatloaf and other fried arrangements where the main flavouring is mixed with a balance of moistening and bulking ingredients.

A diner crab cake recipe, therefore, will usually be based in roughly a third crabmeat, a third of mashed potato or breadcrumbs and a third of mayonnaise, milk, egg or a plethora of regionally specific ‘secret’ ingredients. What’s important for the cook, here (or, perhaps more accurately, the proprietor), is that the filler extends the expensive crabmeat and the wet ingredients maintain the essential juiciness.

This probably makes a load of sense at ‘Cap’n Sam’s, Down East All-U-Can-Eat Crab ‘n’ Steak Cabin’ but it means that in most restaurants we get something containing everything from chopped onions to ketchup and the crab has become a sorry afterthought. The idea of the proper crab cake is to re-evaluate the three-way balance.

I’m indebted to John Thorne for all of his inspiring writing but in this case, specifically to the chapter ‘Crustaceans and Crumbs’ in ‘Pot on the Fire’ which I recommend as the Ur-text on crab-cakes. I do, however, have to differ in one very important way.

In America, it seems, no use is ever made of the brown meat inside the upper shell. For we English seasiders, the brown meat is a rich dark dressing which, like snipe trail on toast, naturally condenses all the flavour of the animal, its life and it’s habitat. It can’t be crab, for me, without a fair mix of both meats.

1. Pick up a freshly boiled crab from your nearest harbour. I can vouch for Whitstable, Christchurch, Poole, Bridport, Cromer, Ventnor, Lymington, Brancaster, Venice, Sydney, San Francisco, Duck and Elizabeth City personally. Other than this, you may have to find your own.

2. Crack the crab and extract all the white meat from body, legs and claws into one bowl and all of the brown meat from inside of the back shell into another. Discard the ‘Dead Man’s Fingers’ from inside the body – trust me, you’ll know.

3. Flake and fluff the white meat with a fork and remove any shell pieces. Carefully mix small quantities of the brown meat into the white, testing until it tastes satisfactorily of the sea. Once happy, weigh it. (This recipe is based on extracting around 500g – please vary quantities of subsequent ingredients according to your yield)

4. Grissini or Italian breadsticks are a fantastic kid’s snack but are also a perfect source of small quantities of breadcrumbs. For 500g of mixed crabmeat allow 4 Grissini. Place them in a clear plastic bag and slowly but firmly roll their entire length with a heavy rolling pin. This feels naughty and is absurdly amusing - I do them one at a time. The clear bag allows the maximum enjoyment. Add the breadcrumbs to the crabmeat

5. Add 30g of the best mayonnaise you can manage. The fresh organic stuff from my local health food shop is gougingly expensive but if I reserve the free dollop from my lunchtime salad I get the last laugh on the Free Market Hippies. Hellman’s will do.

6. Season carefully, beginning with a smear of Dijon mustard then balancing out salt, and black pepper to taste

7. Most US recipes major on Tabasco here – this is because they haven’t heard of ‘Cap Pharon’ harissa – I intend to right this wrong by dropping planeloads of it all over the US when I eventually become insanely rich. At any rate, add a smidgen and taste again.

8. At the back of your kitchen drawer, next to the dusty drizzling bottles you bought after reading about them in Kitchen Confidential, you’ll find two metal rings that you once used to cook embarrassing, tall, nouvelle cuisine food. Swallow your embarrassment and get them out. Use them to mould the crab mixture into as many loosely packed cakes as you fancy and place on a plate in the fridge to set up

9. Fry the crab cakes in clarified butter (either buy ghee or clarify your own by letting it stand in a metal pot near the back of the stove for half an hour or so). Clarified butter can reach miraculous temperatures without burning, enabling you to crisp the frilly edges of the crab cakes in about 2 minutes per side while still imparting the extra-rich flavour of butter.

Serving Suggestion: Eat from the skillet, late at night, alone, with the St Matthew Passion cranked up full and entirely naked – they really are that good.