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I am with you on this. Crab meat is best.

I love lobster. It's great. Delicious. But...it is lobster. There is something about crab meat that to me, brings it above lobster. And not just any crab meat. Blue Crab meat. I know it is a matter of taste, but...there is a subtle taste to Blue Crab that I don't get from other crab meat, even if I do madly enjoy it!

Sometimes I suspect it just tastes better because I have to work harder to get it. Kind of why pistachios in the shell taste better to me than a bag of shelled pistachios, I suppose.

For shellfish, I eat shrimp, lobster, conch, clams and crab. Don't care for raw oysters myself. For lobster, I don't eat much except for the tail, claws, and legs, and if I haven't got my fill of crab from the claws and legs, I'll go inside the carapace and pick at the inside muscles of the legs, and those are pretty good.

And when I get the muscle out of whatever it it, I have to clean it off. I don't want guts all over it, though I do eat steamers which IS the guts.

I used to go crabbing in the Chesapeake bay with my dad as a kid, getting up at 3:30 AM, me and my two older brothers and my dad, gather up the nets and bushel baskets, rent a little powerboat, and head to the pilings sticking out of the water. The crabs would be clinging to the sides of the pilings, so we would lower chicken necks tied to strings into the water near a crab, and when they grabbed it, we would pull it up and scoop them with nets before they let go and tried to swim away. I always thought swimming crabs looked silly and ungainly.

We had six hungry kids, so this was something my parents could feed us that was only limited in quantity by how many bushel baskets we came home with, so we did it often.

My mother would cover the table with newspapers, and with the big pot on the stove with water on the bottom, using big tongs, would transfer the crabs one by one into the pot. She would throw in three or four, pause, pour (not sprinkle...pour) Old Bay Seasoning all over them. Then transfer a few more, stop, and pour more seasoning, making a crab and Old Bay parfait until they were all the way to the top. She covered it and steamed them, and when they were done, she would pile all the crabs on cookie sheets and put them on the table where we would devour them. I was always squeamish about the insides, but I ate the claws and legs. I used to spike my butter just like my mom, with scads and scads of ground black pepper, lemon juice, and...Tabasco sauce! I would extract the meat, and throw it into my butter-bowl concoction to marinate for a few minutes, then take a break from cracking the claws to eat that crab in the hot butter. This was ingrained into me, this love of Blue Crabs.

I went to a conference in Baltimore some years back, and the vendor took us out to a crab house, steamed crabs covered with Old Bay Seasoning, and lots of butter, all you could eat. I tore into those things like a fox tears through a henhouse, and smashing them with wooden mallets, I was piling up carcasses while bits of crab, shell, and crab guts were flying around. The majority of the people in the group were from the midwest, and seeing their faces of fascinated horror as they watched me eat, I am certain they thought I was a brutal, carnivorous madman piling up the crab carcasses trophy-like, looking for all the world like Vlad the Impaler to them.

Those days have been long gone, and I don't have access to crabs like that anymore. A few years ago, I took a trip down to Maryland and brought back a couple of bushels of blue crabs. But somehow, even taking them that far made them seem to lose something in flavor, kind of the way it is said Coors beer used to be back in the mid-Seventies. You could only get it out in that area, and just the act of crossing the Colorado State Line somehow seemed to trigger a degenerative response in the beer that caused it to lose its life before someone in then next state could take a swig.

Never mind the East Coast. I don't appreciate beer well enough to know if any of this is true, but when I cooked those Blue Crabs at home, they were good, but...somehow, lost their zing. It is irrational, I know. I kept those crabs cool and moist in ice and layers of seaweed, but dang, they just were missing something!