Further to this thread (in which I ate baby eels), I’m thinking of another thing I saw for sale on a fish counter in a market in Spain.
Tiny little crabs. A couple of different species (in separate boxes), but small - smaller than, say, an oreo cookie. They were conspicuously not like regular crabs though - not the cornish-pastie-body-shape of the common edible crab - the body was more spherical and the legs were really spindly. They were dark and fairly glossy in colour - the legs were reddish - they were alive at point of sale.
Did I mention they were small? There can’t have been any worthwhile meat in the spindly little legs - even the claws were skinny.
Not Spanish cuisine, but it might give you a clue. I was at a Thai party and saw the same little crabs (though not alive). A woman took some chili pepper lookalikes, some other ingredients I don’t particularly remember, and a bunch of the (raw and whole, shells and all) crabs, put it all into a mortar, smashed it into a paste, and served it with rice.
This is pure speculation, but were they freshly molted, a la east coast soft shell crabs? If they are, then fry ‘em up in some olive oil and toss them into a po’ boy torta (are they only in Mexico, or Spain also?). Or throw them into some paella.
Otherwise, I got nothin’. I hope they are the same species as those damn invasive worthless European Green Crab that are overtaking native crab stock here on the west coast. Send me the recipe and I’ll start eating them.
One lot may have been - they looked a bit like swimming crabs and were fairly pale, but the other ones - the dark ones with red legs - I would say not at all - I saw someone buying them and they made a very hard-sounding clatter as they went into the scales.
On the subject of soft shell crabs… do you eat the whole lot? What about the ‘dead men’s fingers’ (that’s the gills, isn’t it?), which seem to be a serious concern when eating larger crabs.
The ones I’ve had you eat the whole damn thing as far as I can tell. Perhaps there is some preprocessing going on that I am unaware of. I await the expertise of an east coaster.
I can’t imagine cracking open a tiny crab to extract it’s meat. I bought a bunch of rock crab, and they have about 1/4 the meat of an equivalent Dungeness. I am a huge crab fan, but no way am I going to digging into tiny crabs no matter how tasty they are. But Mangetout says that they are the size of an Oreo cookie, so you definitely ain’t cracking that puppy open.
And according to Wikipedia fisherman set aside the crabs that are just starting to molt to be sold eventually as soft shell crabs. I guess that’s what athelas said.
