Crab Stuffed in Orange

The dish is recorded in the Southern Song cookbook Shanjia Qinggong (Simple Offerings of a Mountain Hermit) by Lin Hong, a Hangzhou-era food writer. His entry reads: take a large ripe orange, cut off the top and scoop out the pulp leaving a little juice, fill it with crab roe and meat, replace the stem-topped lid, set it in a small steamer and steam it with wine, vinegar, and water; serve with vinegar and salt — fragrant and fresh, it gives one the spirit of new wine, chrysanthemum, fragrant orange, and crab. That the dish reached the Song court is corroborated by Zhou Mi's Wulin Jiushi, which lists a near-identical 'crab-stuffed orange' (the old character 枨 for orange) as the eighth wine course at the banquet the Prince of Qinghe, the general Zhang Jun, laid on for Emperor Gaozong in 1151. It is thus among the best-documented surviving dishes of Southern Song Hangzhou, and survives today as a revival piece at the city's banquet houses.

You lift the lid and the orange's perfume comes up first, riding the steam. Inside is loose crab — sweet white meat shot through with the richer, slightly bitter roe — warmed and faintly sour from the wine and vinegar that steamed beneath it. The citrus oils have soaked in, so each bite of crab carries a bright orange edge that cuts the richness of the roe. A dip of vinegar and salt sharpens it. It eats clean and aromatic, the very opposite of a heavy crab dish.

Everything rests on the hollowed orange acting as a closed steaming chamber. With the lid back on, the crab cooks in its own juices plus the aromatic oils released from the warmed peel, while the wine-vinegar-water in the steamer below sends acid and alcohol vapor up around the fruit — the acid firms the crab protein gently and the alcohol carries off any muddy off-notes, so the meat stays sweet rather than fishy. Because the crab is fully picked beforehand and only gently steamed, never boiled hard, the delicate flesh does not toughen or weep. The knife work is the real labor: a whole crab must be cleanly dismantled, meat and roe kept intact and free of shell, before it ever goes near the orange.