Get your claws into crabs

With the Lunar New Year fast approaching, it is time to introduce some festive dishes the whole family can enjoy together. Here are two tasty crab dishes that are finger-licking good. Pauline D Loh shows the way

Seafood is always festive. There is something special about these treasures that taste of the sea - with deep and rich, sweet and salty succulence that reminds us of the bounty of Neptune.

I still remember when prawns were scarce in Beijing and crabs were almost unheard of.

Those many years ago, my fellow students and I pooled all our meager resources together and bought our lecturer at the foreign language college a pair of large prawns from the Friendship Store as an end-of-term thank-you gift.

Our teacher's wife happily cooked them and insisted we all shared the dish. There were 10 of us around the table, and we all got a tiny bite. I could barely swallow mine. It was salty, hard and suffered from severe freezer burn, but our beloved lecturer ate it like it was ambrosia from Heaven.

Three decades make such a difference.

The seafood selection in Beijing's markets is now bewildering. My favorite, Chongwenmen market, stocks live prawns that thrash wildly about as they get fished from their metal bins. Fishes gape from large aquariums as shoppers choose which is best for dinner, and the crabs from both river and sea are available all year round, alive and kicking until a precise cleaver blow sends them to crustacean paradise.

This coming Lunar New Year, I will be cooking a lot of seafood, and especially crabs, my mother-in-law's favorite food.

She's a Jiangsu province lady with an insatiable lust for crustaceans and shellfish. When the river crabs are fat with roe and milt, our mama can polish off a dozen at one sitting. I love watching her enjoy her crabs, which she cleans with great precision, picking off meat from even the tiniest claws.

Crabs are extremely versatile seafood, and their strong natural flavor makes them easy to pair with almost any seasoning. Whether you steam them with thin slices of ginger and maybe a dash of soya sauce or a few perilla leaves, or stir-fry them with scallions and leeks, crabs pick up all the aroma of the seasoning herbs and lose none of their own.

They can stand up to the strongest condiments, but they can be delicately cooked as well.

For that reason, I often cook crab in two strong sauces, learned from my Straits Chinese maternal grandmother. One is a black pepper crab, wonderfully aromatic and smelling of melted butter, honey and roasted black peppercorns. You do need freshly cracked black pepper for this as the ready-ground powder loses its potency.

The spicy pepper, the rich taste of butter and the smokiness of cooked honey makes these crabs irresistible - until you taste the sweet and sour chili crab coming up next.

This is the festive dish in our family, a large platter of rich red crabs and sauce that brightens up the center of our reunion dinner table. When this dish appears, we throw decorum to the wind and get cracking on the delicious crab pieces with our fingers. Every little spot of sauce will be mopped up with bread or buns, and no one stops until the platter is wiped clean.

I hope you enjoy both these crab dishes as much as our family does.

BUTTER AND BLACK PEPPER CRAB

Ingredients (serves 4):

3 large blue swimmers (sea crabs) (about 2 kg)

100 g butter

2 tbsp freshly cracked black pepper

2 tbsp honey

Salt to taste

3-4 small red chili, chopped

Method:

1. Scrub the crab shells and dress the crabs. Cut each crab into four.

2. Heat up the butter over gentle heat in a large wok or frying pan. When it starts to foam, add the freshly ground black pepper and stir until you can smell the fragrance of the black pepper.

3. Turn up the heat and add the crab pieces. Keep heat high and toss often to coat the crab in the black pepper and butter. Add honey and salt to taste and continue to toss.

4. Lower heat, cover the pan and cook for five to 10 minutes.

5. Remove the cover, turn up heat again and give the crabs a final toss before plating. Garnish with a scatter of chopped red chili, spring onions or coriander.

Foodnotes: how to dress a crab

1. Keep crab tied up and flip it over so you can see the flap of shell on its belly.

2. An arrow-shaped flap indicates it's a boy and a dome-shaped flap means it's a girl.

3. Take a large chef's knife or cleaver and make a swift deep cut right in the middle of the flap with the heel of the knife. This severs the central nerves and kills them quickly. Don't worry if the legs still wave about - it's just a reflex.

4. Once the crab stops moving, untie the strings and pull off the belly flap. Scrub the shell well to clean off dirt and algae.

5. Pull the body out of the shell by the legs. You will see the gills or "dead man's fingers". Cut them off cleanly and scrub the shell below.

6. Chop the body into four, and remove the pincers separately if they are large. Crack the pincers open with the back of your cleaver.

7. Clean the shells by scrubbing the sides clean. You will also need to trim off the mouth bits and remove the stomach sac, an octagonal bag full of sand and undigested food that is just under the mouthparts. Keep the roe attached to the sides of the shell, and rinse to clean.

SWEET AND SOUR CHILI CRAB

Ingredients (serves 4):

2 kg mud crabs, (about two large, or three medium), dressed

8 cloves garlic, peeled

8 red shallots, peeled

3 cm knob of ginger, skinned

8 red chilies, seeded

1 tbsp good quality bean sauce

2 tbsp sugar

2 tbsp white vinegar

2 tbsp tomato sauce

1 tbsp cornstarch

Water to mix the slurry

2 eggs, beaten

Coriander. Spring onions and chili strips to garnish

Method:

1. Pound or blend garlic, shallots, ginger and chilies roughly together. (You want a bit of texture, not a fine paste.)

2. Heat up oil in a large frying pan and fry the pounded mixture over medium heat until very fragrant. Add the bean paste and stir to mix.

4. Add the crab pieces and toss to coat, leaving crabs to cook covered in the pan over medium heat.

5. In the meantime, combine sugar, vinegar, cornstarch, tomato sauce, sugar and enough water to make a thin solution or slurry.

6. Add the solution to the pan and quickly stir to mix. Add more water if the sauce is too thick. It should just about coat the back of your ladle or spatula.

7. Just before serving, pour the beaten egg into the wok, give it a quick swirl and serve immediately. Garnish and serve.

Foodnotes:

Dressing mud crabs (also known as estuary crabs) is no different from dressing the blue swimmers. The only thing you have to remember is the hardness of the shells. The pieces of crab, including the larger claws, will be easier to eat if they are all given a good whack with the back of a cleaver. That will also allow the crab to absorb the delicious hot, sweet and sour flavors while it cooks.

In Singapore, where this is almost a national dish, the crabs are served with chunks of baguette (French bread), or mantou, huge plain steamed buns. If you like, you can quickly deep-fry the mantou to crisp them up. Simply tear off chunks of bread or mantou and dip them into the eggy sauce. This is a dish with lots of primeval appeal and nothing beats using your fingers and licking them clean.