Brittany, Hospitality, and the Spider Crab Sacrifice

The coast of Brittany, France, near Moëlan-sur-Mer. June 4, 2017.

I wouldn’t have wanted to eat crabs in Brittany no matter how we might have encountered them.

Though I find crabs interesting as creatures, I don’t like the taste of them. Sweet-tasting meat triggers a “yuck” reflex in me; yes, this includes lobster and sugar-infused meat sauces and the ilk. As I’ve lived in Baltimore and in parts of the American South, during which stints numerous people tried to change my mind about sweet-tasting meat with arguments about how I just needed to get over it and about how I’d change my mind if I tried just this one particular thing, you can trust me that I won’t.

We’d gone to Brittany as part of our 2017 France trip—back when we still lived in the United States—and we’d rented a little house on the coast in a town called Moëlan-sur-Mer for about a week. The incredibly hospitable and kind owners lived in the property across the lane. They didn’t speak any English and, at the time, I hadn’t yet started trying to learn French, so Arnaud facilitated all interaction.

Coming back from a walk along the beach early in our stay, the evening before Arnaud’s mother came to join us for a few days, we saw the husband of the proprietor couple in the back garden, Philippe, peeling off his wetsuit, a bucket nearby.

Not far from the bucket, a spider crab had managed to escape and start an attempt back to the sea. (The poor crab didn’t make it far.)

What’s called a “sea spider crab” in Brittany is known as well as the European spider crab or the maja squinado. From what I can find on-line, they’re most commonly fished off the French coast.

Arnaud and Philippe exchanged a few pleasantries, not a word of which I could understand. However, by the end of the exchange Arnaud had a bucket in hand with two crabs clambering around in it.

When we got across the lane to our kitchen, I explained to Arnaud that I don’t really like crabs. However, we couldn’t very well take them back.

The neighbor had told Arnaud to boil them for a set number of minutes, so he put a pot of water on the stove and dashed out to buy a fresh baguette. (Many stereotypes have bases in reality, remember.) I needed to get some work done, and we didn’t want to leave a pot on the stove unattended, so I booted up my computer at the kitchen table.

The tapping of my computer keys couldn’t compete with the volume and franticness of the crabs clicking and scrabbling in their bucket on the counter behind me. However, as the minutes passed, the pace of their clicking seemed to slow. I couldn’t focus. I imagined them suffocating in there, panicked, so far from their briny home. How long could they live in the air? I don’t know.

Arnaud still hadn’t returned when the water started to boil.

I waited. The clicking continued to relent. Slowly.

When I got up to look out the window that gave me a partial vantage point down the lane, I couldn’t see Arnaud coming from either direction.

Would the crabs survive long enough for me to return them to the beach? Would they survive even if they did make it back to the water, after this long in the air? Would trying to get them to back to the water just prolong their suffering? For that matter, did leaving them in the bucket while I waited for Arnaud’s return cause them unnecessary cruelty?

Did my havering prolong their pain?

I decided I needed to act. I couldn’t continue to sit there, pretending to work, listening to their clicking gradually slow.

Just because I don’t eat crabs doesn’t mean I don’t eat meat: I do. And I know meat doesn’t start neatly trimmed and ready for cooking or, even better, show up already cooked and ready to eat on a plate with a lovely side dish. Part of being a grown-up is accountability and responsibility.

Take ownership and face the facts of your diet, I told myself.

I found two wooden spoons and looked down into the bucket at the spider crabs, twitching and fumbling, clicking, still entangled with bits of seaweed and ocean underbottom. I apologized.

I tonged them up, one at a time, as gently as I could, and I placed them into the boiling water.

Afterward, as the pot worked back up to a boil, I slumped weakly at the kitchen table in front of my computer, staring without seeing at the screen.

When Arnaud swung open the kitchen door a minute or two later, baguette in hand, he paused in the doorway, seeing my face, and the baguette lowered a bit. “What happened?” he said.

We poured out the water and let the crabs cool in the pot. When we returned a bit later to address them, one looked like it had gained twice its size in the water. When Arnaud tonged it up onto a dish, we saw that the underplate of its exoskeleton had burst open, its interior filled with eggs.

I’d heard from experienced crabbers when I lived in Baltimore that you always throw back the female crabs, to ensure you protect the crab population. Seeing the eggs added to my trauma. Why didn’t Philippe throw her back? Didn’t he know? Why didn’t I know? Why hadn’t I looked?

I don’t know how long sea crabs live in the air even still. I don’t want to know.

After almost an hour of struggling to extract the meat from the exoskeletons—a process that seemed much more difficult than I’d observed at Maryland crab boils back in my college days—we put the crabs into the refrigerator in hopes that Arnaud’s mother would know how to access it when she arrived the next day. (Her answer, with an eyebrows-raised look of wry surprise at our lack of ingenuity: “YouTube.”)

All together in the crab-infused kitchen, the smell lingering to mock the scrub-down I’d given everything yesterday, we watched a few YouTube how-to videos and managed to extract a mere half-cup of meat from two huge crabs.

Perhaps if you love crab, the animal’s miserable end followed by the exasperating amount of work required to extract almost nothing edible makes sense. (If you don’t enjoy eating crab, you just feel even worse for having participated in their extermination.)

The next morning, though I’d cleaned thoroughly another time and had even taken out the trash yet again, I could still smell crab. Maybe I just needed to air out the kitchen. I’d leave the windows open for a bit. Yet when I closed them, the crab smell remained. And remained.

Days passed, several kitchen cleanings passed, and still the smell lingered—at least for me. I wonder, if I returned to the little house along the coast in Moëlan-sur-Mer in Brittany, it still would.