The mighty crab trounces the feeble challenge of lesser shellfish. Its lip-smacking enticements have been known to confirm the compatibility of lovers, measure the prissy level of different cultures, and incite fierce scientific debate over how it is best prepared and eaten.

Crab. Very possibly the tastiest animal on this planet, bar none. Definitely something to be said for the fire-cured muscles of herbivorous mammals, not disputing that. Am also quite taken with fish bellies, chickens, and the sex organs of the sea urchin. There is no doubt that it would be a much sadder planet without urchin gonads, but in my food cosmology, the House of Invertebrates rules the zodiac, with the sign of Cancer in permanent ascendance over all lesser crustaceans like mussels, shrimp, or lobster. Lobster is nice, but less sweet and more rubbery. Shrimp, less fibrous than lobster, can be just as sweet as crab, with the added virtue of being less complicated to get inside your body, but just a tad less creamy, and more easily overcooked.

Had some black pepper crab the other night, a Malaysian/Singaporean dish. Goddamn but black pepper crab kicks chili crab in the butt. Essentially crabs deep-fried and slathered in a sauce made of sugar and oyster sauce spiced with crushed black pepper, ginger, garlic, and maybe five other spices. Fire and molasses, smoke and sugar snarled into a lumpy and positively satanic black syrup staining the bright orange armor, the translucent casing. The crab’s leg and pincer muscles jiggling like jelly popping out of the ruins of the shells. I had never seen that texture in crab before.

It occurred to me, as the massive pinching muscles disintegrated on my tongue, that the massive exoskeletal architecture that makes eating crab an act that combines the arts of surgery and demolition might have something to do with it. The crab’s armor is the perfect vessel to cook its muscles in. Crab extremities are like little chitin steamers, every reticulated segment cruelly fitted to the muscles it houses. Not to fry in your own fat, but to steam in your own skeleton. A brutal and elegant perversion of the crab’s natural defenses.

Nancy used to be allergic to crab. Angry red welts stippled her body whenever she ate the animal. America, Hong Kong, Taiwan. For 30 years, her immune systems seemed to perceive the ingestion of its proteins as absolutely hostile invasion. Not until she came here, back in the nineties, and could not resist taking a bite of the steamed alien on my plate. We were in an ordinary, unremarkable fishing village in Pangasinan, having a bite before taking a banca to the Hundred Islands. Slow winds snaked through the fronds overhead as she took another bite, and another, crab juices mingling with ginger and soy and all her body’s alarms silent. We watched the sea, and paid the waitress. I thought it might be a sign, because lovers are like that.

When the talangka are fat enough—the gata turns orange, and the little bits of curdled gata become indistinguishable from the taba ng talangka, oh yeah.

Eating crabs is not pretty. The act seems like a rehearsal of the apocalypse. In Japan, gossip magazines routinely infer affairs between celebrities caught eating together in yakiniku restaurants on the grounds that only a couple that has undergone intimate courtship would be unguarded enough to present themselves to the other smelling of meat, oil, and smoke. One wonders if they would make similar deductions from couples eating crab together, except that crab restaurants are something of a cultural rarity over there. Japanese propriety is just too delicate to withstand the stone-age orgy of cracking, hammering, scooping, and sucking that it entails even if the snowy core seems the perfect complement to it. No, the operations are altogether more suited to the hairy-knuckled environs of American crab joints, where they give diners bibs, mallets, knives, and nutcrackers, and you can imagine the waiters gleefully woofing the diners on like they were all on Jerry Springer. Crabmeat supposedly only makes up between 15-20% of the animal’s weight, so eating one involves tossing out the other 80-85% dripping and broken on the table. Kali, the Hindu goddess of death, is often depicted dancing on the body of her dead husband Shiva, but she could be shown as eating crab to better effect, I think. My friend Johnny, who has spent years contemplating its mysteries, says he has solved the maze of divisions running through it, and that the body is essentially a structure of eight funnels guiding muscles to the top of each leg. All web tutorials stop at telling you to split the crab in half, but Johnny goes one step further and advocates splitting each half into four leg-tipped portions, the better to expose the muscle channels. Go Johnny go.

Generally, I think crab is best eaten unadorned, with only ginger, vinegar, chili, and just a hint of soy sauce allowed between you and the meat. The Than Long recipe is an exercise in redundancy, I think: why butter crabs when they’re practically butter already? Why not add egg yolks, whipped cream, and calf brains while you’re at it? The two exceptions to my rule are black pepper crab (see above) and crabs in gata. The subtle and gingered sweetness of the gata seems to be an extension of the crab’s own flavor and softens the meat even more, or maybe it’s like the ingredients were trying to turn into each other. The gastronomical pun reaches its logical extreme in ginataang talangka. When the talangka are fat enough—the gata turns orange, and the little bits of curdled gata become indistinguishable from the taba ng talangka, oh yeah.

What we call taba (“fat”) in crabs, the Japanes call “miso.” The Americans call it “mustard,” and their websites warn that the stuff is an acquired taste and best avoided. The stuff is in fact the hepatopancreas, a ramified network of tubes in the carapace that serve the crab’s digestive system as liver and pancreas. Foie gras is French for “fat liver.” Crab taba is crab foie gras. The crab is a bottom feeder, the marine equivalent of a vulture, an armored corpse-eating scavenger, and the hepatopancreas is where any toxins it has ingested are concentrated. What the hell. No such fears on the cultural horizon here, where jars of taba ng talangka line the shelves of the groceries because we understand that the stuff tastes great. Stuff’s like invertebrate bacon, makes everything taste better. Okey lang yan. . . . Nobody’s died yet!