If you’re heading to the British seaside in the next few weeks, you may find yourself converted to the crab pasty cause
If you followed last week’s post on crab damaging, you’re probably staring at something that looks like the aftermath of Lt Ripley’s meeting with a facehugger and saying to yourself, OK, what next? Well, I promised you a couple of suggestions for crabmeat but this one is a little more than just a recipe. It’s more like a call to arms.
In spite of years of trying, we’ve been pretty much unable to agree on a national dish. Sunday lunch has been suggested but we’re never going to get anyone to agree about the Yorkshire puddings. You could assemble a reasonably watertight argument for the fried breakfast but then some fool would include baked beans and reasonable people would want them killed. Somebody’s suggested chicken tikka masala but I’m not going to stand for that – our nation’s cuisine is represented by something 99% of the population ‘cook’ by piercing the film with a fag end and nuking it ’til it pings? No thank you. Instead, I’d like to make the case for the crab pasty.
At the moment I only know two places in the UK you can get one of these beauties. The first is quite a journey (how far you have to travel depends on where you live, of course – but it’s still quite a journey). Head to the Isle of Wight – an idyll separated from the mainland by a mere half a mile of water and about 60 years – and meander the circuitous and poorly signposted tracks to Ventnor. There’s about 70 yards of blighted prom, a couple of ice-cream shacks and an old couple on a bench that died on the way back from casting their votes for Attlee. They’ve been left to mummify because that’s what people are like in Ventor – they mind their own business. You might be forgiven for thinking that here, you’d reached the remotest part of the country. But you’d be wrong.
About a mile west of the ‘town’, accessible only by means of a stiff hike along the prom, is Steephill Cove, a picturesque inlet comprising a couple of houses and some beach shacks. Here, by long tradition, families of ‘longshoremen’ fish lines of crab pots in return for protecting and maintaining the beach. The Cawes family have been longshoremen for generations, and every morning they boil up a mountain of fresh crab which they bake into turnover pasties and serve from a hatch in their kitchen, straight into the hands of the gasping crab lovers queuing outside.
Can you imagine? This is happening here, in our country. If I told you it was Italy there’d be a solid line of Volvos from here to the Adriatic coast and the locals would slap an appellation on the damn things faster than you could say Champagne(TM). But no. It’s Ventnor. Hell, you could be there in a matter of hours.
I’m told that the other place you can get a crab pasty is one Rick Stein’s patisserie in Padstow. That’s as it should be from our foremost fish booster – but dammit, it’s not good enough.
We have fantastic crabs right round our coast. You just have to chuck a pot in the sea and they come leaping out, begging to be eaten. Anyone can knock up pastry. Four-year-olds with rudimentary Play-Doh skills can form a pasty. This is not, as they say, rocket science or even molecular gastronomy, and I swear, once you have eaten one of these things, you will ignore whatever fish and chips, Cornish pasties, kippers, winkles, laver bread, stottie, barmbrack, chacky pig or Hindle wakes you’ve previously sworn by. You will fling these impostors from you with petulant force and take to the streets, praising the crab pasty with ‘British cheers and loud’.
The recipe, such as it is, is so blindingly simple, so utterly right, that it almost constitutes a meme.
Roll some pastry. Cut a circle. Put some crabmeat on one side, season, fold over the top and bake until nicely browned.
The Cawes family, from what I’ve been able to divine with a joy-addled palate, add sweated shredded leeks and maybe some turmeric, and use puff pastry. Rick Stein adds a dab of clotted cream and perhaps some vermouth. I use a thread of saffron in mine.
But this is the whole point. Whether with shortcrust, added potato, white pepper, mace, more brown meat, more white, a shot of Pernod or a twist of tarragon, the variations are as endless as the regions of our nation. We can maintain our bitter local rivalries, our hard-won, treasured prejudices, our ridiculous internecine bitchery while uniting behind a dish that tastes phenomenal whatever you do to it and is utterly unique to us.
Before you head off for your credit crunch British seaside holiday this year, print out this post. As soon as you’ve dropped the cases in the B&B and the kids have stopped vomiting, proceed directly to the prom and hand it to the first slop-merchant in the nearest caravan, stall or shopfront. If there’s any justice in the world they will slap their heads in wonder at the blinding simplicity of the idea. They’ll embrace it as the Wonder of the Age and devote the rest of their lives to the creation of a better, more wonderfully delicious, more British crab pasty.