Saturday, September 08, 2012
Crustacean experience
The fish man from Grimsby gave up on Epsom market, don't know why as he seemed to do a reasonable trade - although the fish man from Hastings who comes on a different day may have been eating into his turnover. Grimsby has been replaced by Folkstone, in the form of one of those market caravans, the same shape as the sort with which you might go on holiday, but with a long hatch & counter running along one side, usually quite high up to deter grabbers. Staffed up by a shifting band of ladies selling shell fish. They even do jellied eels, which are not, I imagine a particularly popular item in Epsom. Far too posh for that sort of thing.
I have bought prawns from the caravan once or twice and they were fine. I didn't buy crab claws on one occasion, being put off by their being priced £2 or so each, which sounded rather a lot. But yesterday I did buy claws being priced at £13 the kilo or thereabouts, which actually amounts to much the same thing. Of the kilo or so which I bought, maybe a third of the total was one large claw.
We then decided to eat them as they came, with a bit of salad and the white bread from the south bank (see above), completely forgetting that the currently favoured mode of consumption is to make the things into a salad with endive - see August 9th 2011 for an occasion on which we did not quite manage the endive bit.
We left the giant leg until last, which on opening (we use a ball peen hammer for the job. Good smart tap with the flat end and Bob's your uncle) turned out to be bad. Not particularly smelly but not right and not edible. Just as well it was the last one as it rather put one off, tainting the whole occasion.
I shall probably report back to the caravan: off sea food can be a serious matter. I don't think they would palm off a bad leg deliberately because they are in a suburban market place where they need & value regular trade - so palming off obviously bad goods on the punters is not really the way forward. But they might be a bit sloppy about stock control, vaguely thinking, not have been pulled up too often, if at all, that they can get away with it. Or it maybe the crab died of natural causes, perhaps as a result of being stuck in the crab pot for rather too long. Never a good plan, unless you are a vulture, to eat animals dying of natural causes.
I also wonder about cooking time. If you have a very big crab should it be cooked for longer than a small one? Which to my knowledge - derived from a Bembridge crab shack on the Isle of Wight - is not going to happen: the whole lot is just tipped into a large stainless steel cauldron to be boiled up. Maybe a half cooked giant claw will go off far faster than a fully cooked regular claw.
I also wonder about cooking time. If you have a very big crab should it be cooked for longer than a small one? Which to my knowledge - derived from a Bembridge crab shack on the Isle of Wight - is not going to happen: the whole lot is just tipped into a large stainless steel cauldron to be boiled up. Maybe a half cooked giant claw will go off far faster than a fully cooked regular claw.
# posted by Jim @ 11:29 PM 
