Crab Paste

The part of the crab that goes into the paste is the part most people leave on the plate. Pick an edible crab and the sweet white meat comes out of the claws and legs in flakes; the body holds something else, a soft, dark, brownish meat that tastes far deeper and more of the sea, closer to a savoury mush than to anything you would call a flake. That brown meat is the engine of crab paste. Cooked down, worked smooth with butter and a little mace and cayenne, it turns into a dense dark-pink spread that is all flavour and no shape, and a thin layer of it over buttered white bread tastes more of crab than a whole dressed claw would.

It reads dark because the brown meat is doing the talking. The body meat of a crab is rich and faintly bitter and pungent in a way the white claw meat never is, and reducing it concentrates exactly that, so the spread arrives with a low, briny, almost livery depth under the sweetness. The mace and cayenne are not decoration; mace, the lacy outer husk of nutmeg, is the spice the British have potted shellfish with for centuries, warm and slightly medicinal, and it lifts the dark meat where plain salt would only flatten it. A pinch of cayenne pushes a little heat through the back of it. The result is one strong, deep, savoury note, which is why it goes on thin and why a soft white slice is the right bread under it, giving the dark meat something mild to sit against.

The spread fails in ways the fresh crab does not. Brown crab meat is the first part of the animal to turn, oily and quick to go off, so a paste built from it and left open browns at the surface and sours within a day or two unless the butter cap goes back on and the pot goes cold. Pound it coarse and it eats gritty and oily rather than smooth, the bitterness of the body meat with no roundness over it. Lean too hard on the cayenne and the heat buries the crab the spice was meant to frame. And laid on bread that brings its own flavour, a sour rye or a seeded loaf, the dark delicate meat is shouted down before it registers. What it asks for is fine pounding, a measured hand with the spice, butter laid on the bread first so the spread soaks up nothing from the crumb, and a soft slice to carry it.

The first thing off the bite is the sea, then a deep brown savour and a warm hum of mace behind it, then the cool butter rounding the lot against soft white crumb. There is no crunch and nothing cold; it is a smooth, dark, faintly spiced mouthful that fades to a long briny aftertaste, the kind of thing handed to a child at a relative's house with the crusts cut off and the slice quartered into small triangles. A great many British adults can place the taste before they can name it, somewhere between a grandmother's front room and a school lunchbox in greaseproof paper, and the paste is the same either way. Only the framing moves, from a doily on a side plate to a squashed packet at the bottom of a satchel.

Its real work was reach. Fresh crab is a seaside food and a perishable one, landed and dressed and eaten within a day on the coasts that catch it, and Britain's best is named for its harbours, the Cromer crab off the chalk reef in north Norfolk, the brown crabs hauled in pots all round the West Country. Potted and sealed in butter, that same crab could travel inland and keep for weeks in a cool larder, which is how a market town fifty miles from any boat got to taste shellfish at all before the railways and the icebox. The paste belonged to the careful kitchen rather than the grand one: the trestle tables of a church hall, the funeral tea, the picnic basket, anywhere a little protein had to stretch thin across many mouths and travel further than fresh crab ever could. It was the cheap way the coast reached people who lived nowhere near it.

Crab is one creature in a wider potted family, and the cousins are sorted by what got sealed under the butter. Potted brown shrimp from Morecambe Bay is the genteel relation, tiny whole shrimps set in spiced butter and eaten with a fork rather than smeared from a jar, the same technique kept luxurious instead of frugal. Bloater paste runs smoked herring through the format; the beef, ham and chicken jars swap shellfish for potted cured meat ground to the same softness; Gentleman's Relish is the pounded-anchovy member, fiercer and saltier than any of them. What crab paste is not is fresh dressed crab on bread, a costlier and quite separate sandwich that keeps the white meat in visible flakes; the paste exists for the opposite reason, so that crab need not be fresh, or whole, or even mostly the sweet meat at all.

Sealed Under Butter, Before the Tin

There is no inventor of crab paste, and the honest record runs through a preserving technique rather than a person. Potting is the old English way of keeping cooked meat and fish before canning or cold storage: the cook reduces the flesh, pounds it to a paste with spiced butter, packs it tight into a pot to drive out the air, and seals the top with a layer of clarified butter that locks out everything that would spoil it. The method is Tudor in root and well established by the seventeenth century, and Hannah Glasse wrote it down in her 1747 manual The Art of Cookery, potting fish and meat high with mace and cloves and pepper under their butter caps. Crab paste is simply that preserve made from the cheap dark body meat of the edible crab and laid between bread.

The edible crab it is built from is Cancer pagurus, the reddish-brown crab of the North Atlantic that is the largest crab fishery in western Europe, more than sixty thousand tonnes landed a year off Britain and Ireland, two-thirds of its meat the dark, strong-tasting kind that the paste depends on. The same potting habit ran along the coast in named local forms: Morecambe Bay has sealed its brown shrimps in spiced butter since around 1800, and John Osborn was potting anchovies into the jars he sold as Gentleman's Relish from 1828. The jarred crab paste that later sat in larders and lunchboxes carries no single birth date of its own; it is the centuries-old butter-sealed preserve, descended from the kitchens that set Glasse's potted fish under butter in 1747, scaled down to the body meat of a crab and a slice of soft white bread.