Crab Paste Sandwich

A crab has two meats, and the paste is built almost entirely from the wrong one. The white meat from the claws is the prize of a dressed crab, sweet and clean and flaked into visible shreds; the brown meat from the body shell is darker, softer, oilier, a tan curd that tastes of the whole animal and the sea it came out of. Mashed and seasoned and packed into a small jar, that brown meat is what a crab paste mostly is, because it grinds to a smooth tan spread where the white would only dry to threads. The result is spread across soft buttered bread in a thin tan film that smells of low tide and tastes of crab boiled down to its sweetest, deepest part. It is the seaside crab eaten inland, off a shelf, all year.

Brown crab carries a sweetness no other potted shellfish quite has, and the paste leans on it. Off the Norfolk coast at Cromer the crabs feed over a vast chalk reef and come up unusually sweet and well-fed, and that nutty, almost caramel undernote is the flavour the jar is trying to keep. Reduced to a spread the meat loses its flake entirely and turns to a soft savoury cream, so what reaches the tongue is roundness without any structure, a deep tan richness that fills the mouth and then a faint mineral tail of the sea behind it. There is no claw-meat brightness left, no shred to chew, only the body of the crab made smooth. A good jar tastes of shellfish and butter and a sweetness you would not expect from something this dark; a poor one tastes of salt and not much else.

The build can collapse two opposite ways, and the butter referees both. Laid on too thick the brown crab turns oily and cloying and coats the roof of the mouth in a way that outstays its welcome by the third bite; laid on too thin it vanishes under the bread and the slice eats as butter and flour with a rumour of crab. The right pass is a thin even tan, edge to edge, with soft butter spread first to carry it and to keep the paste's oil from soaking straight into the crumb and greying it. A soft plain loaf is the only honest carrier, since a chewy or seeded bread would meet a filling that has nothing to push back against and turn the whole thing into work, the crab lost somewhere inside the chew. A squeeze of lemon or a turn of pepper is the one welcome lift, cutting the richness the way the white meat would have if there were any in there.

The smell arrives before the bite, a warm low-tide saltiness with a buttery sweetness sitting on top of it, the unmistakable announcement of crab in a small room. The bread gives without resistance, the butter slicks the first contact, and then the brown crab spreads across the tongue all at once, soft and sweet and deep, with no edge or flake to interrupt it. It is warmer-tasting than a fish paste and rounder than a prawn one, the sweetness reading almost like browned butter before the briny tail comes through underneath. Nothing crunches and nothing surprises a second time. By the swallow a clean shellfish trace lingers low in the throat, with a faint slick of crab oil left on the lips, and the small triangle has delivered more crab than its size has any right to.

This is boarding-house and bucket-and-spade food, the crab sandwich of a Norfolk or Kentish coast town carried home in a jar so the seaside lasts past the holiday. The seafront version is a dressed-crab affair, white and brown meat heaped fresh on bread at a quayside cafe within sight of the boats; the jarred paste is its frugal, year-round shadow, the same sweet-brown note kept on a shelf for a tea at the kitchen table in February. People who grew up near the crab ports know both, and know the paste is not the dressed crab and was never pretending to be. It belongs to the high-tea tray and the packed lunch eaten on a groyne, plain food with a faint whiff of saltwater and amusement arcades about it.

Its relatives are the other potted shellfish, each a different sea creature handled its own way. Potted shrimp, the buttery Morecambe Bay classic, keeps the little brown shrimps whole under a clarified-butter cap rather than mashing them, which makes it a richer, chunkier thing and not really a paste at all. A bloater or anchovy spread takes the format to oily fish at the strong, salted end. Fresh dressed crab heaped on bread is the parent the jar descends from, white meat visible and texture intact, the opposite handling of the same animal. What sets this one apart down the whole shellfish row is the sweet-brown crab note, soft and deep where the others run sharp or briny.

Cromer, the Chalk Reef, and the Pot

The crab itself has a documented home. The brown crab, Cancer pagurus, lands all along the British coast, but the most prized are the Cromer crabs taken off north Norfolk, where the boats work over a chalk reef now reckoned the largest in Europe; the cold, clean, lime-rich water grows a crab with a high proportion of sweet meat. In the tour of Britain he published from 1724, Daniel Defoe already recorded Cromer crabs being carried inland to Norwich and on to London, so the trade in this particular shellfish was a national one three centuries ago.

The jar comes out of the older British habit of potting. Long before refrigeration, cooks preserved cooked crab, shrimp, and fish by packing the meat into small pots and sealing it under a layer of clarified butter that locked out the air, a technique that kept shellfish edible for weeks and travelled well by coach and rail. Spiced with mace and a little cayenne, potted crab was a respectable dish in its own right, served on toast as a first course, and the smooth jarred paste is the commercial descendant of exactly that pot, the butter-sealed crab turned into a spread for everyone.

What carried Cromer crab from a local catch to a national name was the railway. The Great Eastern line reached the town on 26 March 1877, and the trains that brought the holidaymakers down to the beach carried the crabs back up to the cities, fresh and then potted in butter for the journey. The Cromer boats still launch straight off that beach, hauled up the sand by tractor between tides, working the chalk reef Defoe's crabs came off three hundred years ago.