Feasting on Hairy Crab

When we arrived at the crab restaurant on YangCheng Lake there were about 24 of us.  Chinese restaurant logistics are such that we were seated in two tables of 12.  The budget allowed everyone to have two crabs per person.  Appetizers and other main dishes came first.  It was all good food....but it was all just a warm-up act.  Everyone was waiting for the crab.

According to the MSN travel pages, YangCheng Lake Crab is one of the "25 Things to Eat Before You Die".  I don't know that I'd agree, but there is no doubt many of my Chinese colleagues would.  They had looks of rapture on their faces when the waitress brought out the basket of steamed hairy crabs.  You can see them below, piled in the basket, still bound with twine from the cooking.

Now for a little crab lesson.  The top-most photo shows the cooked crab with twine removed.  If you look closely at the claws you will see what looks like a layer of dark green moss.  This is the "hairy" part of the hairy crab.  Their claws appear to be wrapped in a layer of dark fuzz, like a little crab hand-warmer for the winter time.  (They are also called "mitten" crabs because of this.)  Steaming has caused the hair to become a bit matted.  It has also turned the shell from dark green to the pink color that every lobster lover dreams of.

The photo below shows the working ends of a male and a female.  The female in on the left and the male on the right.  It's important to be able to tell the difference because gender (dare I say "sex") is central to dining experience.  You see, the crabs don't have a lot of meat.  What they do have are body cavities filled up with all the stuff required to make baby crabs.  The September/October harvest intercepts the crabs as they begin their journey back to their mating grounds in the Yangtze River.  They've spent all summer in YangCheng lake preparing to make sweet crab love...only to end up on the plates of people who love crabs. 

The secret to eating the hairy crab is to work from the outside toward the center.  First you rip off the legs and crush them in your teeth, sucking and slurping what little meat you can from the shells.   The crushed bits of shell you spit on your plate.  You save the claws for last.  With luck you will extract a small chunk - about half a teaspoon - of crab meat from each.

With the legs and claws removed, the hairy crab looks like a small UFO.  The photo above shows the corpse at this stage.  There is a trick to opening the body.....you have to find the seam between the top and bottom shells to rip it open.  And once open, you need to be careful the remove the bad parts...the lungs, the stomach, and other bad pieces.  Luckily, I had an experienced crab lover to help me.  (Good thing too.  Last year while visiting Suzhou I had my first taste of hairy crab.  I spent the next three days in the bathroom after, I suspect, eating one of the bad parts.)

With shell split and nasty parts removed, we've reached the journey's end.  The yellow and brown patches shown in the photo above are the creamy goodness that crab lovers dream about.  The taste is different between males and females.  (Overall, the females are preferred.)  But in general the taste is a little fishy, a little sweet, a little salty, and very earthy (or musky or some other adjective like that.)  It requires a lot of slurping and sucking and licking to get all that goodness out of the shell and into your mouth.  Thankfully, table manners are much more forgiving in China. 

According to traditional Chinese medicine, crab is a "Yin" food...which means it has a cooling effect on your internal organs.   It is required to balance this with a "Yang", or hot, food of some type.  It is the imbalance of Yin and Yang, you see, that causes sickness and discomfort.  For our table, we fortified our "Yang" with hot yellow wine steeped with fresh ginger.  Normally,  the Chinese yellow rice wine is not my favorite....it is similar to Japanese sake but not nearly as subtle.  With YangCheng Hairy Crab, however, the rice wine paired perfectly.  The bitter tones of the wine were balanced by the sweetness of the crab.  The ginger added a nice flavor and also added some spicy heat.  I'm starting to think they've got something with this Yin and Yang thing.

That's it...crabs devoured.  I felt like I needed a shower afterwards to wash the crab juices off of may hands and face.  Feasting on the Hairy Crab is messy business.