That sounds delicious. But I’m not going to steam crabs alive…. takes too much time to kill them…

That’s why you serve it as cracked crab, crab salad is reserved for only those people we truly love! (Unless the food budget will allow for the purchase of picked crab, of course!)

You would have loved working at the gun club. It was in my contract that I had an unlimited food budget and never had to cook for more than 30. Usually I only cooked for a dozen or two, at most. The only time I was called upon to cook for 30 was for a Ducks Unlimited meeting and that was just cocktail snacks. My boss told me to really put out a fabulous buffet that day, and boy did I! There was some left over elk salami and I had a lot of Belgian endive and Cabrales cheese, plus I got lucky that day and there were stone crab claws at the market!

When I say this place was “exclusive,” I’m not kidding. The “poor” guy was only worth about $20 mil. and one of the members was a bona fide billionaire. (I’ll bet you can guess who the billionaire is if you read my previous comment.) However, this was 12 years ago, before the economy fell apart, so I don’t know who among them remains. I saw an ad somewhere looking for prospective members and the buy-in price had gone down by about 25%, so… :-/

I wouldn’t have missed that opportunity for anything. I was meant to work there having grown up with that gun club as one of our nearest neighbors, three or four miles down the road. You just don’t find anyone more local than that! My guys absolutely LOVED seeing the old photo albums with pictures from a flood when I was a kid. The camera was pointed toward their club from my back porch in some of the photos with nothing but water, partial fences and telephone poles in sight. They’d all seen the club in a flooded state, but it looks really different on 60s Kodachrome from a new perspective.

As for the Dungeness crabs, well, it’s the Northern California natives’ favorite delicacy, don’t you think? My grandmother was born in Daly City and grew up in Alameda, so the bounty of our local ocean has always been a big part of my family’s traditions. Some things had to be reserved for trips to the ocean, like sand dabs which are rarely found at inland grocery stores. But crab was ALWAYS on the Christmas menu. Well, crab salad, anyway. The crab meat picking “parties” that my mother, grandmother and I would have while seated on bar stools around the newspaper covered bread board were some of the best family times of my life. We would pick, eat crab in its pure and natural state, tell old family stories and laugh our asses off. We may have started with four crabs but in the end we would only have about four cups of crab meat, just enough for the salad. I always preferred to eat my crab cold with some lemon and horseradish-heavy cocktail sauce. Don’t get me wrong, I like it pretty much any way I can get it, but chilled is my personal favorite. I like the traditional crab Louis a lot, too.

One of my most successful lunches when I worked at the private gun club was a chilled crab luncheon. We were experiencing a winter like this last one, where we didn’t really have a winter, and I asked one of the members to bring crab up from the City. I made all the fixings for the members to make crab salads or cocktails: that horseradish-heavy cocktail sauce, lemon halves in their little yellow cheesecloth wrappers, Louis dressing made the traditional way with chili sauce, mixed greens, wedges of the last of the fall tomatoes at the farm stand, halved hard cooked farm eggs, snipped chives, ice buckets with chilled Jordan chardonnay, all served out on the seventy degree deck– complete with blinding white linens, china, crystal wine glasses, and a gorgeous view of the smallest mountain range in the world. It really was one of those sublime experiences that one never forgets.

Looking forward to hearing about that upcoming project you’re planning for next month, which would still be able to take advantage of the tail end of the Dungeness season.

Nice to see that you have crabs (in a chef-y sense, that is).

These things are delicious but Dungeness aren’t exactly abundant over here on the other side of the continent. I think the last time I had Dungeness was in a crap dumpling at the Yank Sing.

So exactly how many of these things did you cook at one go?