One time we went fishing for crabs, which is this slightly odd situation where one motors/rows out onto some topically vacant portion of the sea, tosses a metal basket filled with rotten food into the murky depths (hopefully with a rope or string attached…but not to your leg), then motors/rows back to the beach to go drink beer someplace for somewhere in the neighborhood of 12-24 hours.
Oh wait, it’s called “crabbing,” not “fishing for crabs.” It should be called “trapping” or “sea-ensnaring” or “cage tossing” or some such thing. “Crabbing” sounds so promiscuous, like the result of something regrettable like escalating an online relationship into an actual date or kissing your third cousin.
Crabs On The Menu At Viking Feasts
Then the intrepid and morally sound crabber shoves off once again and motors/rows out to the buoy tied to the end of that rope they left floating atop the churning sea (we forgot that part, don’t forget the buoy, otherwise you’ll end up plowing the seas forever in a hopeless effort to locate your crab pot’s pull-up rope), yards the cage back up in a slightly tipsy and/or hungover state, and *boom* there you have it, a bunch of angry crabs that would easily kill you if only they were about 250 times bigger.
But you gotta do a few things before your Viking-like feasting on these savage beasts, what with the newspaper on the table and the cobs of corn and bowls for shells and bunches of grapes and chalices brimming with the red wine fresh from your conquered foes’ lands and all the Lads & Lasses are there and of course your crab exoskeleton crushing devices—commonly known as crab crackers, which we’re surprised no one has co-opted into a delicious, crunchy salted snack…you know, like Chicken in a Biskit.
Coming Soon:
Crab Crackers® Crusted Crackers with a Briny Twist.
Get Crackin’!!
Produced by Outcasting Holding Company, 411 Dock St., Newark, New Jersey LLC XVIIXXI, All Rights Reserved
Always Check The Private Parts
But before all that, you have to toss the lady crabs back into the sea after identifying their female-ness by checking their genitalia. The male crabs you can keep, so they go into a lidless bucket, which is very important because…
Ah, hold on. Okay. Okay fine, nobody cares but fine.
We hired a biologist for some unknown reason. His name is Carl. He’s sufferable for the most part, but he takes this biology stuff so seriously it gets to be a drag. Plus he’s one of those “oh I just eat half of my Indian takeout for lunch and leave the rest in the fridge, oh I forgot to take it home, sorry it smells so bad in here, wow that was four weeks ago!” -type office mates.
Carl says, “It’s not technically checking genitalia. You differentiate male and female crabs looking at their abdominal flap, or ‘apron.’ The males have a triangular apron, the females a wider, rounder apron.”
Tee hee!
Fine, thank you Carl.
The point of all this is you can only keep and devour the male crabs because the female crabs are deemed more valuable thanks to their propensity for…ah…well, Carl says “…producing multiple batches of fertilized eggs during the molting phase thanks to storing sperm from the first mating.”
Yeah, those lady crabs ain’t dumb. Want to keep everyone alive? Work with a lady crab – she’ll ensure your species is around for the long-haul.
Solve Your Sunday Problem
After this acknowledgement of (once again) the superiority of female leadership/companionship, you should be left with only the vicious, recently lonely, and constantly overcompensating male crabs. In fact, those three character traits explain exactly why a lidless bucket is key to preventing their escape: the easier the exit looks, the more vicious dude crabs get about pulling each other down.
What? Oh. That’s not right. Carl says, “They aren’t vicious, and they aren’t trying to yank each other down. They are all just trying to climb at the same time, and in doing so make escape impossible.”
See what I mean about Carl?
So fine, turns out that you can not only put a lid on the bucket, but it’s highly advisable to do so if you catch only one, newly swinging-single male crab since he could conceivably escape a lidless bucket because his friends aren’t there to wreck the whole thing.
But again, if group effort is required, a good idea doesn’t stand a chance against the social forces of that very same group, because arthropods simply don’t have the brain power to work together. Thank sweet baby Jesus (or whomever) we’re not trying to catch undersea wolves or racoons or bees or some other such group where each member knows their part in the whole. We wouldn’t stand a chance.
Don’t Hold The Shovel
Now that your coffer is filled with these delectable crustaceans and you’ve likely sobered up from all the cognitive and physical effort, it’s time to motor/row back to that beach (sigh) once again, which is the perfect spot to murder and then clean your crabs.
One time we participated in this ritual, and it got really freaky because we were in San Francisco with this goth hip hop/metal fusion band, and they had us hold a shovel spade side up in the sand as they chanted some Druid poem and cracked the live crab in half on the shovel point. Which we quickly learned covered us in green crab goo. Maybe that was the point. So don’t fall for the shovel-holding trick…
Oh. Carl says it’s not “goo,” it’s the gills and lungs. He also says, “The best and most humane way to prepare crab is to stun them first by placing them in a salty ice bath, then throw them in an already-boiling pot to steam them, and then disassemble.”
Okay, that’s good, thank you. And then part-out the meat—which will take only about four hours depending on your dexterity with teeny tiny crab pokers and scrapers and similar instruments—then devour. With butter. And bread.
Oh, don’t forget all that red wine and your Lad & Lass friends. Where would you be without them?
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