Name: Baked Lyme Bay Spider Crab
Yield: Serves 4 as a starter
Cuisine: British
Ingredients: 2 tablespoons grated Cheddar cheese; thin slices of toast, to serve; 50 g fresh white breadcrumbs; 3 tablespoons sherry; 100-200 g prepared brown crab meat (depending on how much there is in the spider crab); 2 teaspoons English mustard; 100 g butter; ½ onion, finely chopped; 1 large (1½-2 kg) cooked spider crab or brown crab; 1 garlic clove, crushed; salt and freshly ground black pepper; 3 tablespoons fish stock (or a corner of a good-quality stock cube dissolved in that amount of hot water); juice of ½ lemon

Preparation info

Serves
4
as a starter

Difficulty
Easy

Appears in

British Regional Food

By Mark Hix

Published 2006

About

We used to catch spider crabs by the dozen when we were kids, and we regarded them as pests in our prawn nets - quite apart from the fact that they were pretty scary-looking things. I used to love brown crab, but in Dorset, no one encouraged us to eat the spider crabs. We were told they were taken to Spain and made into soup, but I don’t think people really knew their fate and were just guessing at what the resourceful Spanish really did with our unwanted delicacies. If you can’t find spide