The sun was just easing over the horizon when Matthew Eaton hopped into his skiff and set off into the glassy waters of Eggemogginn Reach. A short distance from the shore, he reached his destination: a wooden platform where he had suspended two traps the night before. Each held a small catch of frisky, reddish crabs.
It is the height of the lobster season, when most Maine lobstermen let the little crabs go, instead of collecting them as Eaton does. With so many lobsters, worth so much more money, most lobstermen don’t want to bother with crabs. But Eaton is no fool; he knows his customer.
Welcome to the world of the peekytoe crab, where one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. This little crab is so beloved at Spago, one sixtyblue, Jean Georges in New York City, the French Laundry in Napa Valley and other equally famous eating establishments that the chefs pay $12 to $14 a pound for something that has long been routinely discarded.
In just a few years the peekytoe, which weighs less than a pound, has been transformed from a throwaway byproduct of lobster fishing to a star in the culinary firmament.
The crabs can be found all along the East Coast but are especially abundant Down East, the waters off Maine from Rockland to Eastport. Maine residents pinpoint Down East, particularly Penobscot Bay, as the source of their finest seafood.
But until Rod Mitchell, the owner of the Browne Trading Co., a seafood wholesaler in Portland, started calling one species of Maine crab by its local slang name, no one knew or much cared which kind of Maine crab they ate. Even Mitchell’s competitors agree that it was a brilliant marketing move to convince a handful of influential chefs that a crab variously known as sand crab, mud crab and rock crab, was really a peekytoe crab and more desirable than any of the better known crabs from elsewhere like Chesapeake blue, Dungeness and Alaskan king.
“When I started calling it that I never thought it would become so much of a marketing tool,” Mitchell said.
Until last year, Ingrid Bengis, whose small but select seafood company is located in Stonington at the southern tip of Deer Isle in Penobscot Bay, called peekytoe crab “Maine crab meat.”
One of her customers, New York chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, had been using it since 1985 but knew it only as Maine crab. Bengis became aware of the term about a year ago. “Chefs started saying to me, `Is it peekytoe?’ ” she said. “I never cared about branding, but now I realize other people care about those things and they are important.”
Today crab cognoscenti like Vongerichten and Eberhard Muller of Lutece wax rhapsodic about it: “exceptional,” “incredible,” “so sweet, so fresh.”
Its delicate sweetness seems best suited to simple preparations.
At one sixtyblue in Chicago, chef Patrick Robertson uses the crab sandwiched between Yukon Gold potato pancakes and served with a lemon water sauce and beet juice for an appetizer.
In Maine, peekytoe crab is mixed with mayonnaise and stuffed into a toasted, buttered hot dog bun, much like a lobster roll.
Handle with care
What really makes peekytoe crabs better than other crabs is the care with which they are handled, cooked and picked–essential work, because the crabs are too fragile to be shipped live.
In Maine, this is still a cottage industry and the best job is done by lobstermen’s wives. Until recently, the wives prepared the crabs in their home kitchens. But since the new federal food safety laws went into effect, the crabs are now prepared in structures built next to lobstermen’s homes.
Chefs have their favorite pickers. Thomas Keller at the French Laundry in the Napa Valley, Vongerichten and Muller are among those who insist on the crab meat from Bengis, who collects from several pickers on Deer Isle. Others want only Linda Harford’s crab meat, which is sold under the name Mac’s through Browne Trading. Her crab also comes from Penobscot Bay. The good pickers are in such demand that Harford says that two years ago she was offered $5,000 by a distributor to pick exclusively for his company. “This business has become so cutthroat,” she said.
There are plenty of others who distribute peekytoe crab meat, but their product does not have the same cachet. That’s partly because not all of them are so scrupulous about freshness, keeping peekytoe separate from other kinds of crab and being vigilant about pesky bits of shell that fall into the meat.
Keller is so partial to crab prepared by Linda Gray, who picks for Bengis, that he has asked her to sign each of the containers she does for him. Not many of the pickers can hear the sound of a fleck of crab shell when it lands in the bowl of crab meat. But Gray almost never misses and it makes her daughter, Tiffany Eaton, crazy.
“Tiffany gets so mad at me because every once in a while I yell, `There’s a shell,’ ” Gray said, as she and her daughter picked away on a recent morning.
“There are different levels of crab meat because there are different levels of pickers,” Bengis said. “It depends on how well you drain your crab meat; how dry it is. If it’s too moist it spoils quickly. If it’s too dry it loses its flavor. And freshness.”
Gray refers to the peekytoes as sand crabs but says the local slang for them is not peekytoe but “picked toe”–pick-ed pronounced as if it had two syllables–because the crab leg has a very sharp point that turns inward. “Picked is Maine for pointed,” she said.
Gray and her daughter can pick between 20 and 25 pounds of crab meat a day. “The most I ever picked alone was 27 pounds, but that will pretty much kill you,” Gray said.
Her problem in the summer, like that of Linda Harford, who lives down the coast in Owls Head near Rockland, is not too many crabs, but too few. Lobstermen can earn as much as $3,000 a day catching lobsters at the height of the season, and they don’t want to bother with crabs that bring their wives around $200 a day.
New regulations
The future of this cottage industry is uncertain since the government implemented its rules to improve the sanitary conditions under which the crabs are processed.
“A lot of people are going out of business because of the new rules, which say you have to have a special building to cook and pick the crabs and have to take classes,” said Gray, who took the classes to learn the new regulations called the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points.
“Those regulations are just common sense,” she said.
Just as no one can agree on the best season for peekytoes and whether they are sweeter before or after they molt in the spring, there is no agreement on the real name for them.
No matter what it is, you and I cannot go to a fish market and buy a container of peekytoe crab under that name. You can buy Maine crab, but it could be red or Jonah as easily as peekytoe, or a combination of all three.
The alternative is a trip to a top restaurant, where you will find it by name on the menu, or a trip to Maine.
CRAB SALAD WITH ZUCCHINI, TOMATO AND BASIL OIL
Preparation time: 35 minutes
Cooking time: 15 minutes
Yield: 4 servings
Adapted from Jo Jo restaurant in New York City.
Basil vinaigrette:
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
2 1/4 teaspoons lemon juice
1 1/2 teaspoons sherry vinegar
6 large basil leaves
1/4 teaspoon salt, or to taste
Freshly ground pepper
Salad:
1 medium zucchini, thinly sliced
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
4 tomatoes, peeled, seeded, chopped
1/2 bunch fresh thyme, tied together
1/4 teaspoon salt, or more to taste
Freshly ground pepper
1/2 cup basil vinaigrette
8 ounces fresh crab meat
Zest of 1 lemon
Basil sprigs
1. Combine vinaigrette ingredients in blender. Blend 1 minute. Set aside.
2. Have bowl of ice water ready. Heat small saucepan of salted water to boil over high heat. Cook zucchini in water 1 minute. Drain; plunge in ice water 10 seconds to stop cooking. Drain.
3. Heat olive oil in large skillet over medium-high heat. Add onion and garlic; cook until translucent, about 3 minutes. Add tomatoes and thyme; cook 15 minutes. Set mixture aside to cool. Remove thyme; discard. Season tomato mixture with salt, pepper and 3 tablespoons of the basil vinaigrette.
4. Stir together zucchini, salt, pepper and 2 tablespoons of the basil vinaigrette in small bowl. Combine crab, salt, pepper, lemon zest and remaining basil vinaigrette. On each of four plates, Arrange zucchini in circles on four plates, overlapping slices to form ring. Place crab in middle of circle. Spoon tomato mixture around zucchini; garnish with basil sprigs.
Nutrition information per serving:
Calories ………… 410 Fat ……….. 35 g Saturated fat .. 4.8 g
% calories from fat .. 76 Cholesterol .. 45 mg Sodium …….. 445 mg
Carbohydrates …… 12 g Protein ……. 15 g Fiber ………… 3 g
