ISSUE 56, CRUSTACEANS, Part 4: Stone Crabs
Stone Crab
Menippe mercenaria. The name gives me a chuckle. It is like “crab for hire.”
It is a brownish red creature, spotted red across its carapace that measures 6 inches across when mature. It has got a khaki colored underside. The claws are unequal in size, both black tipped on the pincers. The larger claw is the object of a watermen’s craving. The shell is sturdy. It is a money harvest, particularly in years when stone claw crab meat floats over $12 a lb.
In that blessed time before the Pandemic, Naples Florida hosted one of the fine small food festivals in the Coastal South, The Naples Stone Crab Festival in late October. At several venues along the Bayfront, you could secure as many claws straight from the steam pot as you could stuff in your gullet. Only the claw of the stone crab is harvested. It is removed after the crab is taken from the pot and the live crab tossed back into water to regrow its lost appendage(s). That process takes from 15 to 18 months. It is graded into three size categories for market: “Medium, Large, and Jumbo.” There is no appreciable difference in taste in the meat of the different sizes. The standard accompaniment is melted butter if the crab meat is hot. Many prefer the meat of the claw cold, for its texture is less “mushy” than the hot steamed claw. The cold meat marries well with a mustard based sauce. (Sour Cream, Mustard, Melted Butter) In recent years the cold meat has been served with salsas, often with a citrus component in them.
The flavor of Stone Crab is decidedly finer textured and deeper than snow crab. The cliché that it tastes halfway between lobster and blue crab doesn’t speak to the distinctiveness of its taste. There is a bit of the fattiness of lobster—that much can be granted. But the deepness of the taste is surprising.
The Florida Stone Crab crawls along the sea beds seizing mollusks, crushing them with their huge claws and feeding on them. Unlike the blue crab, the Stone Crab does not swim. In the 1990s the big Florida harvesters invested much $$$ in traps and prepping seabeds. Because there was virtually no profit in fishing blue crabs then, and because gill netting was outlawed, forcing those watermen to turn to stone crabbing, there was an expansion of the fishery that eventually triggered greater regulation. The season runs from October into May—then harvesting stops while the crabs breed. Because the meat freezes beautifully if kept in the shell, the limitations of season do not necessary mean that the meat is not available from June through September.
There have been experiments with stone claw meat over the years at Florida and Gulf Coast restaurants. I’ve had fritters incorporating a flour and shredded coconut crust to balls of the meat. Too much of an “idear” and nowhere near as satisfying as the stone claw crab cake (Maryland Style) I had in Jacksonville 5 years ago.
The commercial exploitation of the Stone Crab dates from the early 1920s when Joe Weiss, a Miami restaurateur, heeded the advice of a Harvard Ichthyologist about the edibility of the claw meat, and featured it on his menu. They became instantly popular and he rebranded his eatery Joe’s Stone Crab Inn. Weiss’s cook, a Geechee culinarian named Horatio Johnson, was the first to make the steam pot the vessel of Stone Crab cookery. The Inn became the nexus of Stone Crab cooker for the twentieth century under four generations of the Weiss family. Members of the family became leading advocates of the sustainable fishery, and formulated the law stipulating the return of the live crab to the water after removing its claw. They also pushed for the immediate process of the crab claws. For this reason the cold, already processed meat of the crab became the standard form encountered in restaurants, though restaurants in port cities would feature steamed crabs just landed at the docks. (The Naples Experience). In the 2010s Stone Crab was Florida’s #1 remunerative catch, with spiney lobster, white shrimp, and red grouper trailing behind in terms of $ value of the catch. While the natural range of the crab runs from North Carolina to Mexico, Florida, the home of its commercialization remains the center of the fishery.