Cracked Dungeness Crab

The crab is named for Dungeness, Washington, a small fishing village on the Dungeness Spit at the Strait of Juan de Fuca, where early commercial fishing for the species was done; George Vancouver gave the place its English name in 1792 for its resemblance to Dungeness in the English Channel. The commercial fishery itself began in 1848 with San Francisco fishermen and is often called the oldest shellfish fishery of the North Pacific coast. Cracked crab with drawn butter has no single inventor; it is a Pacific-coast serving tradition, most strongly documented around San Francisco but equally the everyday form in Oregon and Washington. Only hard-shelled males above roughly a 6.25-inch carapace may be taken commercially.

The body meat is white and flaky, the leg and claw meat firmer and faintly pink at the edges, all of it clean and slightly sweet. Warm, it is sweetest; chilled, it firms up and reads briny. Drawn butter coats each strand; lemon and cocktail sauce cut the richness. A whole crab yields only about a quarter of its weight in meat, so the work of cracking is part of the meal.

Live crab is dropped headfirst into water salted to roughly seawater strength, about one cup of salt per gallon, and boiled around seven minutes per pound, near fifteen to twenty minutes for a one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half pound crab; the shell turns bright orange when done, as the carotenoid astaxanthin is freed from its protein complex. An immediate ice-water bath halts carryover cooking. Overcooking toughens the meat: the muscle's myofibrillar proteins denature and contract, squeezing out moisture and leaving it rubbery. Cleaning is usually done after cooking, removing the belly apron, the top carapace, the feathery gills, and the viscera before cracking.