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Recipe for crab sandwiches
To use a well worn metaphor, making a crab sandwich is not the time to be thinking about silk purses out of sows ears. With so few ingredients anything left wanting in freshness, quality or generosity will only serve to disappoint. You really cannot polish a turd.
Although I’ve seen some very posh versions of them, a crab sandwich is the antithesis of haute cuisine. For this very reason, and the fact that I grew up eating them, is perhaps why I love them so much.
Family summers were spent on our farm off the West coast of Ireland and luckily for us, an uncle was a salmon and lobster fisherman with a huge and almost valueless by-catch of big, meaty clawed Atlantic crabs. Most of the year they would be deposited unharmed back over the side of the curragh to continue as they had been before being enticed into the lobster pot by a piece of high mackerel. However, when my father and I were on the island not all of them made it back into the drink.
Huge pans of crab claws would be boiled after supper on the turf fired range and left to cool by the window for later on. After an evening in the pub, the crab claw mountain would be well and truly conquered by a smoky kitchen full of swaying, ruddy cheeked men taking turns to splinter shell and a few fingers with the back of the firewood hatchet.
Loaf after loaf of soda bread would be buttered, sweet milky tea would be brewed to offset the bruised fingers and eventually the sound of heated discussion over the price of wool would replace the sound of breaking crab shells signifying that the bottom of the bucket had been reached.
Cook your crab in plenty of sea salty strength water and leave to cool on the side. Don’t be tempted to refrigerate it to speed things up - the severe cold will dent the sweetness of your meat and leave an ever-so-slight bitter aftertaste.
When it is cool enough to handle, extract as much meat as you can before your patience runs thin and mix with a little homemade mayonnaise if buttering your bread and slightly more if not. Season with salt if needed, a squeeze of lemon and a dash of Tabasco if inclined. Spread very thickly over your (un)buttered bread and eat standing up in the kitchen.
Save all of your crab shell and trimmings for a fish soup and your crab will have doubled in value.
