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Crab Cakes for Lt. Ripley
A Culinary Alphabet:
C - Courtesy
When did it become the defining characteristic of a culinary genius that he must be a foul-mouthed yahoo with psychopathic tendencies and a hair-trigger?
PRs and newspapers dwell with lascivious indecency on stories of Marco
Pierre White slicing off a cook’s whites with a knife and whipping
him with wet tea towels. Jamie Oliver only shed the taint of a pier-end
comedian when he was heard cursing illiterate trainees and Gordon Ramsay
has built a lucrative TV career on scripted insults, brooding malevolence
that would look poorly acted on 'Eastenders' and an almost certainly fictional
working-class Scottish upbringing.
The first Chef I worked for was an entirely amiable Swiss called Jacques
who lived with his family over the restaurant. He used to invite me into
his office to share desserts he’d invented and share his worries
about his daughter becoming ‘Born Again’.
After service and half-way down the second bottle he’d suggest that I went upstairs and ravished her as a general prophylactic against a deeper relationship with her Lord and Saviour.
Aside from this one Lutheran aberration he was a quiet, kindly and deeply creative man who rarely raised his voice above a whisper.
Next, I worked for a little fat Frenchman called Giles who regularly wept
when he had to drown the rats he caught in gluetraps. Later it was a barrel-shaped
Jewish New Yorker called Howard who used to send his Mother her dinner
from the kitchen every night then take a ten minute call at the height
of service wherein she’d enumerate his failings.
All the cooks I’ve worked for, in fact, have been unfailingly charming,
polite people who loved food and wanted to teach. If you want a real bastard
of a boss, I’ve discovered, look to public relations people, advertising
men and TV presenters.
I thought, maybe, I just hadn’t worked for the real top dogs. Then
I read this…
“Remembering the indignities and brutalities suffered in his
youth, he forbade drinking on the job, swearing, shouting, and any vulgarity.
If a cook erupted into a fit of temper, he was quietly admonished…”Here
you are expected to be polite. Any other behaviour is contrary to our
practice.” In the face of unpardonable breach of such decorum, he
habitually pinched his left ear and announced in a soft voice, “I
am going out. I can feel myself getting angry.”
Maybe simple courtesy doesn’t make good TV. From the quote, it seems
Escoffier didn’t have to worry about such things.
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.
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