Alan Davidson

Snow Crab

Appears in
Oxford Companion to Food
Oxford Companion to Food

By Alan Davidson

Published 2014

  • About

snow crab Chionoecetes tanneri in the N. Pacific and C. opilio in the N. Atlantic, crabs of polar waters which have become important commercially, indeed an important and valuable food resource. An alternative name for them is queen crab and, as one would expect, there is a king crab to match, in the form of Paralithodes camtschatica.

The most obvious characteristic of these crabs is that they have enormously long legs; so their meat is usually marketed frozen or in cans, since the great length of these relatively thin legs and the distance of the fishing grounds from the markets make any other procedure uneconomic.