With drunken crabs on the table, it’s best to divide them one by one in advance, giving everyone plenty of time to enjoy them slowly. A more irresponsible approach would be to cut up two or three pieces and leave them all in the pot for everyone to pick, which may lead to unnecessary and invisible struggles: those who want to take a bigger piece are embarrassed to do so, while those who have got a smaller piece are silently sighing. I’m afraid that most of the people at this table will not be friends with him because of this yellow crab head.
It’s serious. Fortunately, the tables I’ve sat at with drunken crabs have all been in the hands of reasonable and considerate hosts. For example, on a recent occasion, the drunken crab was not in the cold pot sequence that appeared at the beginning, but on the main menu near the end. The wine went through three rounds, the dishes went through several rounds, and everyone had long lost the spirit of continuing to eat meat, when suddenly a small crab shell was served, which was no more or less than a whole shell of crab yolk, because of the dense wine, the crab yolk was deep purple in the golden yellow, condensed to a full and thick, as you can imagine, never the kind of yellow that is sandy. In the olden days, it was said that males should not offend females and females should not offend males, meaning that the crab must be strictly distinguished between males and females, otherwise the taste will become as soft as mud and sand. Although drunken crab is a marinated food that can be made by ordinary people, the male should be in charge of the male and the female should be in charge of the female, so that the most delicious crab yolk can be maintained in a firm and soft state. While eating a shell full of crabmeat in an empty mouth is certainly enjoyable, the hosts serve a small mouthful of rice held up by seaweed shaped like a Japanese hand roll and leave a small spoon next to the crab lid, which is meant to be the most extravagant drunken crabmeat hand roll you can make. When you open your mouth wide and swallow the hand roll, you get 90 percent rich crab yolk, eight percent vinegared rice, and two percent crispy seaweed. This is a “main course” that no one would refuse, even if the guests are already nine percent full.
Eating crab used to be a common thing for the Chinese, but now it is becoming a luxury. Drunken crab has also changed with this trend, going from being a common pickled dish to a rare event at banquets. In fact, there are famous drunken crabs everywhere in China: drunken crabs made with glutinous rice wine at Weishan Lake in Shandong, drunken crabs soaked in local sweet rice wine without sugar at Xinghua in Jiangsu, drunken crabs pickled in Fengjang wine and garlic at Tunxi in Anhui. The popularity of drunken crabs in Jiangsu and Zhejiang has doubled recently because the Shanghai private chef Wang, who washes crabs in her bathtub to make drunken crabs, was on TV and became famous all of a sudden. But think about when you were a kid, which family didn’t wash crabs in their own bathtub to make drunken crabs – in Shanghai in the 80s, although every household would decorate a bathtub, it was already a sham. Who would really waste the water in the bathtub when you can take a quick shower? Since you don’t use the bathtub, sometimes you’ll find an extra fish swimming in the water, or a net full of shrimp, or a bunch of small hairy crabs waiting to be made into drunken crabs before dinner.
The big guys I know who specialize in crab products are now talking about making drunken crabs, using eight-year-old Shaoxing wine, Guangdong soy sauce, old chenpi of sufficient vintage, and good rock sugar and brandy, and picking the right wine jar, so that the conditions for pickling drunken crabs are complete, and put them in one by one, slowly and gently. Another friend in Chaoshan was even more sophisticated, using saturated brine, highly potent wine, lots of garlic and light soy sauce, coriander and other ingredients to pickle the hairy crabs for more than 10 hours, then picking them up and putting them in the -15 degrees Celsius cold storage. When you take it out to eat, it is so smooth and tender that you can suck the meat and crab yolk out with your tongue in each bite. This has the soul of Chaoshan pickled crab and the shadow of Shanghai drunken crab. The female elders of the family used to pickle drunken crabs with much heavier hands. They were soaked in high white wine and then sealed in a jar of yellow wine with soy sauce, rock sugar and the seasoning of each family’s choice. Of course, the drunken crab recipes in the hands of chefs today are more like subtle differences but each with its own subtleties, and the brewed crab is like a culinary hero with condensed kung fu. But in the past, the drunken crab made at home only had the homely virtues of pickled rice, sometimes the shell was broken, the yellow was scattered, and even when you picked up a piece, the crab meat had all slipped away, but at such times, with a bowl of hot pickled rice for breakfast, even if it was just a piece of cold crab shell, the sweetness of the wine and the freshness of the crab from its immersion could be on the tip of your heart for three seconds.
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