White Only?

Why is the best part of the crab ignored in Ireland?

It was 1980, I was a student at Trinity College, Dublin, and during the Long Vacation, I found myself assisting a former teacher of mine with his group of 14-year old boys on holiday in Ballinskellings, Co Kerry. I was the cook for this gang of voracious youngsters and I remember cooking chicken curry with lots of Sharwoods and serving HB ice cream with a sauce made of melted Mars Bars. It was fun.

I had never tasted crab and I found myself idly asking in the pub if there was any to be had locally. Next day, a whole banana box of live crabs turned up at the door of the hostel where we were staying and I set to cooking them. There was no internet and a phone call to Dublin, via a wind-up telephone and an operator, was only possible at certain times and it ideally had to involve a matter of life or death. Hard to believe now, of course, but that was Ireland in the dark ages (or my youth as I prefer to call it).

Anyway, I boiled the crabs for probably half an hour - certainly longer than was necessary and then took hold of one to dismember. I inspected the inside and recoiled; the inside of a cooked crab is not immediately appealing and the “dead man’s fingers”, as they are called, look a bit sinister.

So, I ignored the lovely brown meat that dwells within the carapace and proceeded to pick the meat from all the claws - lovely white crab flesh, even if it was rather overcooked. I am ashamed to think of what I threw away but I can only plead youthful ignorance and the absence of the internet.

These days, I buy my crabs whole and alive and cook them as recommended by Rick Stein: 15 minutes for the smaller ones, 20 minutes for the bigger ones. And, having cooled them, I twist the undercarriage or abdomen off the upper shell or carapace and remove the brown meat with a teaspoon. Brown is sometimes a misnomer: sometimes it’s brown, sometimes greenish, occasionally orange as you can see in the picture below. And there’s always some still attached to the inside of the abdomen.

The brown meat is the best, the most intense, with a distinctive mineral tang. Perhaps it’s too much for most people in Ireland because all you tend to see is the white stuff that comes predominantly from the claws. There is good white meat to be found if you cut up the boney interior of the abdomen and use a lobster pick very carefully. This is what I do, and I have to set aside quite a long time to get it done. Then I mix the white and the brown meat together.

That’s the abdomen cut in two, and ready for picking, pictured below.

Years ago I had a slice of toasted sourdough spread with brown crab meat, served with half a lemon in muslin, as a starter in the much-missed Hereford Road in Notting Hill; it was the simplest starter you can imagine, and one of the best I’ve ever had. Rich, of course.

Chefs are said to prefer male crabs (the ones with the narrower flap) because they have bigger claws and therefore more white meat but females are much easier to find. Only 5 to 10% of the Irish crab batch are male.

The two parts of the crab that have to be removed are the fringe of grey “fingers” and the mouthparts (above) which are where you would expect them to be; they detach quite easily.

Here, below, is the white meat sitting on top of the brown, before they are mixed together:

We like to eat the mixed meats with lemon juice and black pepper on discs of our own cucumber (very good with a glass of dry fino or manzanilla) and every now and then, as a carb-laden feast, with linguini. I soften some very finely chopped garlic and mild red chilli in plenty of butter, then add lemon zest followed by the crab and heat all gently together.

It’s rather good.

Marco Pierre White once told me that went for a stroll in Bulloch Harbour in Dalkey and found one of those big industrial bins filled with crab bodies from which the claws had been wrenched. That should be a crime, but it’s hard to blame fishermen if Irish consumers refuse to eat brown crab meat, even when mixed with white.