Crabs, Crabbing, and Crabby Old Men

There’s this machine I once bought at our cherished Fordham Hardware. It is called the Crabmaster II (I have no idea what happened to Crabmaster I), and the instructions outside of the packaging make it look as if there is a little crab-processing factory inside the box. I imagined it as being similar to the famous Bass-o-Matic machine touted by Dan Ackroyd on the original Saturday Night Live–a kind of grinder processor that makes the crab mushy but edible. The instructions say that as the result of owning this machine, you will have beautifully clean and tender crab meat with as little effort as possible. Well, I found out that you do get nice, tender, mushy back-fin crab meat, but I also found out that to arrive at that tender meat, you have to do all sorts of intense labor with the crabs. In other words, you have to clean and pick the crabs before the Crab-o-matic will even start working for you.

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I have a mind to call the Crab-o-matic people as a crabby old man to ask them what the hell I am supposed to do with the claws, since they aren’t written into the instructions at all. I want to turn a technical writing class loose on those instructions, anyway. The instructions tell you to numb the crabs for ten minutes by putting the living crabs on ice, then pull them apart, alive, as they squirm. They want you to take off the mouth parts and pull out the deadmen (I think those are the gill sacks), then quarter the crabs, scrubbing out their intestines with a tooth brush (whose tooth brush?). You have to numb LIVE crabs with ice, pull off their limbs, crack open their backs. Now I know exactly why crabmeat costs so much. I start to feel sorry for the crabs at this point, and I think of becoming a vegan.


The Crab-o-matic people want you to keep the body parts on ice for ten hours and then run the back-fin sections through the Crab-o-Matic (yes, it is a squishing machine with a hand crank). You squish them until the backfin meat comes out–the cranking is only slightly easier than doing it with your own fingers.


Now, here is why I want a sensible tech-writing class to look at those instructions. All the body parts are left uncooked, of course. So, after ten hours, what DO you do with the claws–cook them, or throw them away, along with 50% of the meat? And my friend Maria, who fishes and cleans fish for a living, thinks that claw meat is the best part of the crab. When I told her about the Crab-o-Matic, she said "When are you going to ask for your money back?"


I have become fascinated with the process of crabbing, since I used to do it, many years ago, on the Chesapeake Bay. Old-time crabbers, sometimes crabby old men or old men of the sea, set out many individual pots in the rivers and saltmarsh creeks using whole fish, the greasy and smelly menhaden (the fertilizer fish), as bait. As often as they can, perhaps every three days, the crabbers come by in their jon-boats or Whalers and collect the crabs. On board are scales for weighing the crabs and a cooler chest for storing them alive but numb. Below a certain size, little crabs get thrown back. Collecting from fifteen pots in an hour or so is hard work, but then if you have a good catch you can take them to W. H. Gay’s seafood and sell them. Then, in a restaurant like the aptly named Steamers, a customer can buy nine whole steamed crabs for $9–you pick ‘em–and everybody makes a profit.


What if you want your own crab pot, perhaps tied to somebody’s dock? You can have up to two pots without a license for crabbing, and, if you put a salmon head or a turkey neck from a local supermarket in the bait chamber, tie a polyurethane rope securely to the pot, and hurl it into the deepest part of the channel (so as not to have the pot out of water at extreme low tide), you will have crabs, guaranteed, sometimes within several hours of setting out the pot. Be aware, though, that if you put your crab pot on a community dock, someone may get your crabs, or your pot. If you put your pots out in the channel, you need a float to identify the pot and a boat to collect the crabs.


But what do you do when your pot is full of crabs? I don’t know anyone who reaches in the pot bare-handed, since you would have to be really quick to grab that back fin without getting cut to ribbons by front claws. Crabs are relentlessly aggressive, ripping each other’s claws off when a bunch of them are assembled in a crab pot or bucket. You can use very heavy gloves, if you like, or a pair of crab tongs from the Lemon Island seafood place. The people who process fish at Publix use a kind of chain-mail glove, to keep from being spiked. Although there is no limit for how small a crab can be in a private pot, you might throw back the smaller crabs to be caught again when they are larger.






The crabs will kick up a ruckus with their naked aggression in a bucket of marsh water, but you can keep them that way until you get home, and they will stay alive for some time, burbling and blowing bubbles to show they are still alive. Don’t leave them outside in intense heat or in full sun or they will die. You can numb them on ice if you like, and you can boil them quickly, and almost painlessly: it’s very quick, but you don’t want to think about it.


To pick a crab, get out the edible meat, is a tedious process, and the tediousness is the reason why crabmeat costs so much. If the crabs have been boiled to death (really, being exposed to boiling water kills them very quickly) and then iced down to help make the shell brittle and to preserve the meat, the claws can be cracked with the back of a sturdy knife, front and back, and the meat carefully extracted, with care to remove any strips of cartilage inside. The yucky part is pulling off the shell (what deviled crabs are cooked in), and toothbrushing out the intestines. This is not a job for the squeamish, and doing it may turn you against eating crabs.


When you get really good at crab-picking, you will get enough shell-free meat for deviled crabs or crab-cakes or crab-burgers for three people out of about ten medium-sized crabs.
You really need your sense of touch to release the backfin meat without taking in a few bits of shell or cartilage, but, believe me, if you have gotten that far, you will have a great sense of accomplishment in producing a beautiful food. Machines can’t do the work as well as fingers can. As for all the shells and awful offal, that can go in the mulch, to make some good fertilizer for next year’s tomatoes.


What happens to the Crab-o-Matic, as you get really good at catching and picking crabs? I think it should go way up on a cabinet shelf, behind the turkey roaster and the other utensils you use only once or twice a year.


The salesman at Fordham Hardware, to do him credit, told me the truth. When I asked about the Crabmaster II, "Will it work," he said "We sell a lot of them." This is a typical, cleverly-evasive sales-person answer. It means, when translated, "I really don’t know if it works, but it is popular." If you go one level deeper in interpreting this message, what he means is "I don’t think it works, but I would like to sell another one, so please buy it because other suckers have, in the past, and we need the income."