Crab

I’ve often spoken of all the interesting and wonderful people who cross my path. Well, Wayne Brokke is one of those people. Wayne had seen me on QVC several times, and when the opportunity arose for a trip to Savannah, he made a special point of coming in to meet me. We had a great time getting to know each other. Wayne is the owner of Wayne’s Bar-B-Que in Baltimore, where he also does cooking segments for a local television station. When I mentioned to Wayne that I was writing another cookbook, he graciously offered to share a few of his recipes. They are Wayne’s Cranberry Sauce, and the following recipe, which is a five-time winner of the Maryland Old Bay Soupstakes Critics and People’s Choice Award. Thanks, Wayne, and continued good luck to you!

A luxurious treat, sweet, crisp crab cakes can be made with lump or backfin crabmeat. Frying the crab cakes just before you plan to serve them will ensure that they don’t get soggy upon standing. Serve crab cakes with scrambled eggs, inside a crusty baguette, or with lemon wedges and Rémoulade Sauce (page 284).

This is an elegant salad in which an abundance of colorful, crunchy vegetables really picks up the flavor of the crab. Spiked with lemon juice and lightly bound with mayonnaise, it can be an entrée served over fresh greens or a great sandwich filling.

If you’re using fresh crabs, you want to use the meatiest ones you can find, such as Dungeness crabs from the West Coast. The little blue Maryland crabs are good, too, but they are a lot of work to get the meat. I usually figure about one-third of the whole crab weight will be meat. So, for every pound of crab, you might get one-third pound of cleaned meat. If fresh crabs are not available, you can usually find freshly picked lump crabmeat at your fish market. If all else fails, frozen pasteurized canned crab will suffice. Serve with Asparagus Potato Hash (page 210).

There is a small but distinguished group of seafood and tomato dishes, from the Provençal soups with their croûtes and brick-red rouille to Portuguese soup-stews reeking of garlic. With those dishes as a starting point, I spent some time working on a soup of tomato and crab. After making several versions that were too thick and rich, I took the step of bringing chile and lemongrass into the proceedings to add a breath of freshness and vitality. This is a bright-tasting soup that sings with the sweet heat of chile and crustacean. To add enough substance to treat it as a main dish (when this recipe will serve 3 or 4), I introduce a last-minute addition of bean shoots or maybe some shredded, very lightly cooked snow peas.

This dish is inspired by the Provençal ingredients of fennel, orange, and fresh seafood. For the fullest flavor, rub the marinade into all the cracks and crevices of the crab shell. You’ll want to have bibs, nutcrackers, and crab forks on hand to enjoy this meal in all of its messy goodness. Serve with a light green salad and plenty of fresh, crusty bread to soak up the sauce.

This dish first caught my eye early in my career when I worked as a line cook at Chicago’s legendary Ambria Restaurant. We served it as an appetizer, making everything from scratch, including the pasta—and it was one of our most popular dishes. This is a perfect dish for dinner parties. I promise it will impress your guests. Follow the fresh Egg Pasta recipe on page 109, making sure you include the optional squid ink.

This dish was inspired by Korean cooking, which is extremely popular in Japan. With a hearty and spicy broth, it’s perfect for wintertime, when crabs are at their peak flavor. I like to serve this dish in individual Asian hot pot dishes, but you can also combine this recipe into one big pot and ladle into bowls. If you’re using live crabs, be sure to remove the head, gills, and tough outer shells before cooking.

Here is an elegant summertime recipe that you can pull together quickly, with minimum time at the stove. You can use fresh or canned crabmeat, and fresh or frozen shrimp and squid. My local supermarket sells frozen squid that has already been cleaned, which is what I use when I cook this dish at home. The sweetness of the seafood in this recipe pairs nicely with the tomato dipping sauce, while the arugula adds a nice contrasting zing.

Winter is the best season to enjoy this dish, when crab is at its most flavorful. I love serving these noodles in individual clay pots, which are such an intimate and satisfying way to enjoy a meal. These vessels become very hot when you cook in them, though, so be careful when you remove them from the burners. If you don’t have a clay pot, you can use other vessels, too. (See the discussion on clay pots in the recipce for Somen in a Clay Pot with Chicken and Eggplant, page 90, for more information.) Timing is very important for this dish to cook correctly, so make sure you have your game plan ready before you start.

This is a classic ramen dish that was one of my favorites when I was growing up, but today it’s not as popular as it used to be in Japan. That’s a shame, because there’s so much to love about this dish, especially the play between the sweetness of the crab and the crunchiness of the water chestnuts, and the dramatic presentation of a big chunk of omelet sitting atop the noodles. This dish is finished with two kinds of broth, one to serve as the soup, the other to add a bit of sheen as a glaze. I hope you love this ramen as much as I do.

When these noodles appear on restaurant menus in Japan, it heralds just one thing: the arrival of summer. This ramen is a classic warm-weather dish, popular from June until September. Chukka means “Chinese,” a reference to the origins of ramen noodles. And it’s not just a restaurant dish—when I was growing up, my mother loved to prepare this for our family.

For an over-the-top po’ boy, try these crabs in a French loaf dressed with shredded lettuce and sliced tomato, or serve them on a bed of heart-healthy Classic Cole Slaw (page 35) for a new Southern twist on an old favorite.

Soft-shell crab season starts the night of the first full moon in May and lasts through September. A soft-shell crab is a blue crab fortuitously interrupted (for us, not the crab) in the middle of a growth spurt. A blue crab emerges from the muddy waters to shed its outer covering (exoskeleton). A soft-shell crab is a blue crab before its new shell hardens. Fishermen use baskets to catch crabs known as “peelers,” crabs that are beginning to split at the ends and are about to molt. They bring them onshore and hold them in water tanks until they complete the molting process. Once the peelers are in the tanks, they are watched closely to catch them within one hour of shedding. Softshell crabs that are newly shed and not pulled from the tanks are in danger, since they are immobile and basically dinner to other crabs in the water tank. Another reason to harvest them soon after shedding: if the new shell gets too hard, the fishermen have lost their harvest.

When vacationing as a child on the Gulf of Mexico or along the Atlantic, we would often spend an afternoon crabbing along a shallow pier or rocky jetty, using crawfish nets whose white-cotton webbing was long-ago colored a muddy red-brown. We would tie a bony chicken neck in the center of the net, toss it out into the shallow waters, and wait. Being a child and waiting patiently to pull in the nets do not go hand in hand. Until one of our parents intervened, we would pull in the nets to check them so often that the crabs didn’t have a chance to find them, much less saddle in for a good gnaw on the chicken. When we did catch them, it was important to release the females to help maintain the crab population. I always had a hard time telling them apart until one crusty Maryland crabber explained to me years later, “The male looks like the Washington Monument and the female looks like the Capitol.” Indeed, the underbelly flap of the male is decidedly pointed and long and the female’s is round with a nubbin of a tip. I like crab cakes, not crab-and-bread cakes—there needs to be just enough binder to hold the crab together. Use jumbo lump or lump crabmeat, be sure to keep the crab very cold since it spoils easily, and carefully pick through the meat to remove any bits of shell.