Name: Hard Crabs
Ingredients: hard crabs; coarse sea salt

Hard Crabs

Ingredients

hard crabs
coarse sea salt

Directions

Buy live hard crabs.
Plunge them head downward into boiling water to kill them.
Cook in salted boiling water for at least 30 minutes.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

Hard crabs: The main ingredient; the shell and meat are cooked together in the boiling water.
Coarse sea salt: Seasons the boiling water so the crab meat takes on a salty flavor as it cooks.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.