Partan Pie

A traditional Scots recipe for making a substantial hot dish from a cooked crab, concentrating rather than smothering the flavour of the beast. You can use tinned crab, for speed, or a dressed crab, or more economically, a freshly boiled but whole crab - ask the fishmonger to remove the inedible bits, the greenish ‘dead man’s fingers’ or lungs. See below for dealing with it. Crabs should be heavy for their size, and weighing between half to three quarters of a kilo in their shell, to feed t