Security men get claws on crab pâté

Damien Enright on a race against time with crab bounty.

WE hope somebody ate the Fresh Courtmacsherry Crab Pâté confiscated from my son at Cork Airport last week as he set out to fly home to the Czech Republic. Otherwise, what an awful waste.

How the security staff could have thought a screw-top quarter-pint glass jar containing what was clearly crab meat, white and brown mixed, was an explosive is beyond me. It could be opened, poked and smelled. The aroma alone would have told the story. It was labelled Fresh Courtmacsherry Crab Pate in my own fairish hand, I having created it myself by dint of hours of labour.

The extraordinary thing was that he was allowed to bring aboard the 10 large arms, complete with the dangerous-looking claws of the crabs that made the pâté. These claws, in the hands of a young man six foot two in height, could surely be threatening.

Even more extraordinary, fellow passengers carried aboard heavy, square-shaped bottle of gin and litre bottles of vodka, bought at the duty free and readily convertible to formidable weapons. Yes, bottles galore and crab claws were allowed on board the aircraft — but now a couple of small jars clearly containing nothing but a soft, gooey seafood-smelling pâté-de-crab.

In the landlocked Czech Republic, crab straight from the sea in west Cork would have been a rare treat. The brown meat inside the carapace of the crab is the thing. Few seafood delicacies can beat it, mixed with the white meat painstakingly extracted from the labyrinthine ways of the creature’s interior, with a little garlic added.

I am the chef-de-crab. I am the chef-of-nothing-else in this household, blessed with a resident chef with whom I could complete on no level other than in boiling eggs. I kill them as humanely as possible, boil them with half-pounds of salt, eviscerate them and prise out every last edible morsel. Back into the bay go only the shells, the dead men’s fingers and the tails. Something will dine on the fingers; they are toxic to human beings.

My friend, the crab fisherman, gives me good value for money.

There was the night he arrived at 10 o’clock with 24 lively crabs when we were in the midst of giving dinner to friends.

Some were trying to climb out of the box, but a few looked like they were giving up the ghost.

Crabs have to be cooked when fresh. Expired crabs should never be eaten. There was nothing for it but to set to as soon as the guests went home. At 2.30am, after a fine dinner and more than a few glasses of wine, the prospect of boiling 24 crabs in saucepans on the kitchen hob was daunting. No saucepan was big enough to hold more than three or four crabs, and there are only four gas rings on the hob. I stared deep into the eyes of the more forward of the captives, climbing on one another’s backs and clearly expressing an aversion to the ambience.

The great Masefield poem came to mind: “I want to go down to the sea again, To the lonely sea and the sky…” Suddenly I had the solution. I would let half of them go.

I roused a son from bed and asked him to drive me and 12 crabs down to the sea. The incoming tide was still 20 yards out as the fortunate dozen set off across the wet sand, slicked by the light of the moon.

One was possibly the biggest crab I had ever seen, a female, a foot across, six inches wide and four inches deep, her claws almost as big as my hands. I was loathe to relinquish such a feast to the deep, but my reasoning was that such a huge old female would spawn 10 times as much as a crab half its size, and I owed her fecundity to the ocean. Off she trundled, tired but, I fancied, relieved.

Next day we found her on the sand, splayed out and motionless. I should have eaten her while the eating was good. Soon, she’d be feeding gulls and grey crows. But whoever or whatever ate her, she had a better fate than her comrades confiscated at Cork Airport and thrown into a bin.