Feeling crabby

People call me a snob, not just because I write columns like this one, but because I am rather picky about what and how I eat. It is not that I will not get down and dirty because I am too snooty to get my fingers sticky-icky, but more that I am completely incompetent at tackling certain foods and would rather get my practice in without an audience. So if at speciality restaurants I avoid choosing, for instance, shellfish or snails or even cuts of meat, it is more my inability than my inaccessibility that is showing itself off.

Seafood, in particular, is a perfect demonstration of my lack of coping skills. It first got aired in public soon after I started working when, many years ago, I met a crab…a plateful of them, in fact. A friend had very fondly offered to take me to eat the “best crabs in the world”. Rather sceptical of that claim, but as enamoured of the creatures in most forms, I went along. Until then, my acquaintance with the crustacean had been of the American kind, very polite, civilised, sanitised and, frankly, fairly boring – all the meat is carefully scooped out and arranged back in for a wonderfully faux ‘crab cracking’ experience, with only the most intrepid and die-hard fans of the sweet meat demanding to go it themselves, crackers, claws and all.

So there I was, enthusiastic and clueless, waiting with a certain delighted anticipation for the treat I knew I was going to get, if only I did not eat my way through all the pickled onions and kill my appetite and tastebuds before then. The crabs arrived, held high on a platter by a friendly waiter. He set it carefully down in front of me, handed me a bib and a set of crackers and beamed proudly, encouragingly, waiting for me to dig in. I looked at the crabs, the crabs, had they been able to, would have looked back at me. I looked at the waiter, then at my friend and then at the restaurant manager, all of whom were beginning to look back at me with some worry wrinkling their foreheads. The crabs were taken back, the shells cracked to some extent, and then returned to me. I was ready to burst into tears, but reached for a pickled onion instead.

What ensued is a long and painful story. Suffice it to say that I slunk out of the restaurant in complete disgrace, regarded with huge amounts of reproach by the friend, the waiter, the manager and, if they had been able, the crabs as well. But those had been eaten, with a considerable amount of help from the aforementioned friend, waiter and restaurant manager, while I sat and watched, helpless and almost in tears at my lack of participation and incapability to muster up enough courage to get cracking…in a manner of speaking, of course.

Things have not really changed since, mainly because I have been avoiding the subject of all things crabby…err...crablike for many years now. But today, at a crab-filled lunch, I watched carefully and fascinatedly as my friend cracked his way through his sunset-red crustacean, nibbling, sucking and picking with much élan, great skill and single-minded hunger. At intervals, he would spoon a small heap of crab meat on to my plate, its meat sweet under all the spice that the creature was cooked in. and, even as I enjoyed the stuff that I actually do like very much, I vowed to always eat it in the company of someone who could do all the dirty work for me. Or else get myself a new and hyper-efficient can opener that could act intermediary between me and much crabby eating.