Lucy Boyd - Kitchen Memories

This is a wonderful recipe for spring, when the baby onions are so sweet with pearly white bulbs that have not formed a paper skin. Rose fell in love with the cooking of Sri Lanka, bringing this dish back with her. She was very excited about it, the combination of fresh crab meat with hot chillies and finely ground spices, the crab still in the half shell, and needing to get your fingers dirty. Licking-your-lips good.

On family trips to Cornwall to stay with Su Rogers, in her house overlooking the Falmouth estuary, there is always an abundance of live crabs and this was often a way of cooking them – relaxed, with everyone going at it to get to the sweet, spiced flesh.

Fishmongers will often need some notice if you want to order live crabs, as they tend to cook them as soon as they come in.

2 medium-sized live crabs, weighing about 2kg, kept in the fridge with some damp newspaper on top so that they fall asleep before you boil them ( see here)

1 tsp cumin seeds

40g fresh root ginger, peeled and cut into small pieces

4 garlic cloves, peeled and roughly chopped

2 fresh green chillies, cut in half lengthways, deseeded (optional), stalk removed, then roughly cut into pieces

olive oil

8 spring onions, green ends cut and root end trimmed

1 lemon

1 smallish bunch of fresh coriander, leaves picked from their stems, washed and dried and chopped

salt and black pepper

Fill a large saucepan with enough cold water to submerge the crabs. Add tablespoon of salt and bring to the boil. Once the water is boiling, drop in the crabs and cook for minutes. Remove the crabs and leave to cool.

To prepare the crab once cool, place it on its back on a chopping board, then pull the legs and claws away from the main body and put to one side. To separate the main outer shell from the crab’s undercarriage, keep the crab on its back and remove the tail flap, then ease the top and bottom apart with your fingers (you might need to separate the meat from the shell first by inserting a blade between the two and twisting it to release). Discard the stomach sac, just behind the mouth, then remove the dead man’s fingers, which have a greyish gill-like texture to them. Scoop out the brown meat from the upper shell with the juices. Using a strong, sharp knife, cut the body section in half and with a skewer or crab pick, carefully remove the delicate white meat. Crack the claws with a hammer once in each of their different joints or sections.

Crush the cumin seeds in the pestle and mortar, then add the ginger, garlic and chillies and pound to a paste.

Heat a good drizzle of olive oil in a large pan, then add the paste from the pestle and mortar and the spring onions. Cook for a few minutes to allow the onions to soften, then add the brown crab meat and juices, the claws and legs and season with a squeeze of lemon and salt and pepper. Cook for a few minutes to heat it through, then add the white meat and chopped coriander and toss together.

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