How to Cook Crab the Papini Way

First, you'll need need to cook your crabs. To do this, get a big lump of butter. Put it in a pot. Put minced garlic on it, and then cover that with some paprika. Turn on the heat until the butter melts. Mix it all up with a fork.



Don't use a wooden spatula or a big spoon or anything. Those are for pansies. You need to feel the heat on your fingers. That and I couldn't find my wooden spatula. Now, put an inch or two of water in the pot. Put some more butter in if you really want to. Let it be until it starts to boil.


While you wait for it to bubble (this shouldn't take long), you should clean your crabs with water and a sponge, especially if it just came from the bay. You can die just from breathing near that water. I've seen it. Anyways if the crabs are moving around a lot you might have to fight them first.


Cut slices of lemon and put them in the pot. When the water is boiling again, throw the crabs in one by one and watch their death throes (if that's the kind of thing you're into). Then put the top on the pot, and let cook for five or more minutes, shaking occasionally, then flip the crabs over and cook five or so more minutes.
Note: this recipe works excellently for crawdads, nature's tastiest crustacean. Hopefully in the summer I'll have some crawnini recipes.


When they've finished cooking, and have that nice red color, you're ready to take them out and smell them. (Make sure not to overcook them! The first time I cooked crabs, I saw white stuff coming out of them, and thought it was pollution or something, so I waited until it stopped. It turned out that it was the meat boiling off. I had empty crab shells with brown residue for dinner that night. My family was ashamed of me) If you like, you can put a little lemon hat on the crab to make it look more festive.



Pop the top shell off the crab and disconnect it. There should be a yellow pasty stuff in this shell. This is called the body butter, and some people throw it away, but it's actually the most flavorful part of the crab. You can make up your own mind whether you want to eat it.


Yum. Now that the top is off, shave the gills off of the main body, and then cut it in half. This is all good to eat. If you were to be eating just the crab, this is how you would serve it, except with little hammers.


Caution: Eating crab or crawdad has the potential to be a very emotional experience. Try not to be alone, and refrain from anthropomorphizing your animals. Nobody wants to eat their pet. I remember once I caught and cooked crawdads alone, and ate them alone. It felt like I was eating a human tongue, and after I stopped eating, my stomach felt warm and alive and it felt like such a waste of life. It was almost enough to make me go vegetarian. Thankfully I got over it and was back to meat-eating within the day. Phew. A good way to avoid what I call "The well-fed hunter's lament" is to either not eat meat unnecessarily, or just try not to view the meat as parts of a whole, but as specific tasty slabs of food.