Nagaur crabs

I can’t seem to make up my mind about crabs. When I see the scary crab shell cracker next to a dish of whole crabs, I wonder if it’s worth the effort. At the end of the meal, after I’ve cracked every claw and demolished its meat, I sigh contentedly to myself. Yes, indeed it’s worth it, I say.

I went through this exercise the other evening at a friend’s house. Chef Arun Kumar T. R. had cooked crabs in the Kerala style that day, and I was again struck by a few home truths. It’s a fact that crabs don’t taste the same when they are cooked separated from their shells. And it’s also a fact that eating them when they are shelled is a tiresome and messy chore. But crabmeat is sweet — and perhaps it tastes even better because of all the effort that goes into cracking claws.

My faith in crabs is restored every time I eat a dish cooked by Arun — a filmmaker who started out as an amateur chef before he took over the kitchens of the Zambar restaurants in Delhi, Gurgaon and now Pune. Arun indeed is a crab cooker par excellence. And what I find particularly interesting is that he’s been trying out various crab recipes of southern India.

Kerala pepper-garlic crabs

The coastal regions of the South are full of delicious recipes. I can give an arm and a leg for a well prepared dish of Kerala pepper crab. And what’s great is that it’s so very easy to cook too. Chef Arun tells me that all you have to do for this is clean your crabs and then boil them in salted water. Sauté garlic, pepper and curry leaves in butter, and then let the crabs simmer in the butter gravy for 15 minutes or so.

Arun believes that the taste of the mud crab is sweeter than that of the kinds found in the sea. He uses mud crabs when he cooks the crustacean in a curry. If he is working on a whole crab dish, he likes to use the bigger sea crabs.

For a good crab dish, he says that if your crabs are breathing healthily when you buy them, the dish is tastier than the one where you use crabs that are dead (bless their little hearts). The problem with a dead crab is the all important factor of freshness. What makes a crab dish special is essentially just that. Dead crabs tend to spoil easily.

To make sure that your crabs taste good, Arun suggests that you use the lightest possible masalas. For instance, for his nagaur crab (a recipe from Tamil Nadu), he boils the crab in salt and turmeric water, and then marinates it with ginger-garlic paste and lemon juice for a couple of hours. He then sautés fennel and curry leaves, adds chilli powder and coriander powder to it, and stirs in the crabs. Likewise, the Mangalore crab curry is just flavoured with coconut, chillies and kokum.

Of course, a few good masalas work well in some recipes. The peethala iguru (see recipe) of Andhra Pradesh, for instance, makes the most of spices, flavoured as it is with poppy seeds, fennel, cloves, cardamoms, cumin, coriander and cinnamon.

There’s one thing that you have to come to terms with when you eat crabs — there is no delicate way of doing so. You may like to hold your little pinkie up when you drink your tea but crabs have to be eaten with a big bib under your chin, and several napkins to periodically clean your fingers and mouth with. It’s messy — but, as I keep discovering (after despairing), worth every bit.

Peethala iguru
(serves 2)

Ingredients:

• 4 mud crabs

For the marinade

• ½ tsp turmeric
• chilli powder to taste
• 1 tsp Kashmiri chilli powder
• paste of ginger (2 inches), garlic (8-10 pods), coconut (3 tbs)

For roasting and grinding

• 6 cloves
• 1 tsp cumin seeds
• 3 tsp coriander seeds
• 1-in cinnamon stick

Other ingredients

• ½ tsp fennel l6-8 green chillies l2 finely chopped onions
• 3 tsp poppy seed powder
• 2 sprigs curry leaves

• l6-8 chopped spring onion

Method:

Sauté fennel, green chillies and curry leaves. Add and fry onions till translucent. Add the crabs. Add water and cook. Add the poppy seed powder and masala powders. Simmer for 10 minutes. Mix well. Garnish with chopped spring onion and serve.