Smash and crab

The other night we went to bash crabs with mallets at an unpretentious (bare concrete floor, plastic chairs and TV blaring out a hundred decibels’ worth of nowt) local place.

They keep the crabs out the back, in a series of rather smelly and unappetising tiled enclosures, feeding them on – well, what *do* crabs eat normally? In this case, it’s couscous, fact fans – and you can go out there and choose your dinner, if you want to. Perhaps I should have made it clear earlier that we were going to eat them rather than torture them for fun, but for some reason I find mallet-based violence irresistibly comical.

Each enclosure contains progressively larger specimens, with prices scrawled on the wall. The boy comes out with a bucket and a pair of tongs and grabs the ones you point at, after which they start frantically scrabbling around in the bucket. I’m sorry to say that the flicker of guilt this induced was instantly swamped by a tide of gleeful anticipation.

They went and did something to make them dead, and then we got to smash them to bits. Unfortunately I was a bit over-enthusiastic and ended up expressing profound regrets to Aline’s sister, who kindly waved my apologies away with the hand she wasn’t using to wipe crab brains out of her eye. This did have one happy result though; our friend Meire, who was my instructor for the night, finished up by scraping the brown, slushy contents of her crab’s head out with a spoon and eating them, and would certainly have insisted I do the same were mine still in situ rather than pebble-dashing Alicea.

Last time I tried eating crabs (the last time I was here, in fact), I ended up hungry and frustrated. You’re supposed to wrench off the legs, crack them a bit and then suck the meat out, which is harder than it sounds, although pleasingly atavistic. (Ug.) Thanks to Meire, I managed it this time, and they were actually really delicious – you know how chef types are always raving about the freshness of ingredients – and I’m going to take anyone who comes out to visit me to the same place, so don’t say I didn’t warn you. I promise to place you out of range, however.