This is a recipe for moéche, the green, soft-shelled crabs that live in Venetian lagoons: mix a batter of flour, eggs, salt and parmesan cheese in a bucket. Drop live crabs into the batter, which must be cold so that the crabs will feel at home. For 30 minutes, the last of their lives, let the moéche scuttle around in the batter, eating it. Then drop them into a pot of boiling hot oil: self-stuffing crabs.
The moéche are crabs – “true crabs” – that have moulted: they have soft shells for just a few hours, before their exoskeletons turn hard. To climb out of their too-small skins, they fill themselves up with water, so that the carapace splits. Then, they pull every part of themselves from their own skins – from the tips of their legs to their eyeballs.
They are a delicacy, a treasure “on par with the white truffle”. As children, my sister and I would find crab treasures to take home – a pincer, or a five-legged crab – in a river in the park where we walked our dogs. We would keep these body parts in an old tin in the fridge, visiting them after school.
Every crab, and every crab claw, makes an impression. We caught a live crab in a rock pool on the first day of a summer holiday, and watched her for hours: she was a swimmer crab and her back legs were furry paddles. They were strangely poignant, as though this was a crab who had given up something hard for something softer, like hands, or paws.
A crab’s complicated face, like an intricate chest of drawers, or a jewellery box: press on this part and it opens to reveal a mouth, on that, and an eye pops out on its stalk. Every bit of its armour seems as though it is a container for a precious object – which, of course, it is.
Every crab makes an impression. William James, Henry James’s older brother, was a psychologist and philosopher. When he set out to study people’s individual relationships with religion and mysticism, in lectures that eventually became a book called The Varieties of Religious Experience, he anticipated criticism:
The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us as if it must have been sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. ‘I am no such thing,’ it would say, ‘I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.’
Watching crabs “clicking out past themselves”, as Dennis Saleh put it, you know they are saying only this: I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone. And for a few hours, the moéche, for a few hours themselves, themselves, alone. An animal lucky enough to live behind armour suddenly feels everything. How could we not want to know what that tastes like?
• Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist. Her first book, a memoir called Freak of Nature, will be published in 2024
• Do you have an animal, insect or other subject you feel is worthy of appearing in this very serious column? Email helen.sullivan@theguardian.com
