Charleston She-Crab Soup

As late as the 1930s Blanche Rhett could remember the soft Negro voices of the Charleston crab men waking ladies in their high-ceilinged bedrooms along the Battery with the cry, “She-Crab! She-Crab!” And she could remember the she-crab soup prepared by her able butler, William Deas, “one of the great cooks of the world.” In an ideal world, we would all have fresh crabs from the crab man and a butler-cook to clean them and pick out the white meat and roe from the she-crab’s