February 12, 2015 — In any war between humans and alien invaders, it is the humans’ duty to go out on scouting missions, discover the enemy’s weaknesses, plan cunningly, and attack. Those are my thoughts — maybe more like sci-fi daydreams — while driving last fall into Boston’s Seaport District. Our destination is a short street lined with industrial buildings called Seafood Way. We arrive, park, and find ourselves looking across Boston Harbor at jetliners landing and taking off.
Between Seafood Way and Logan Airport lies about a half mile of saltwater, sparkling in the sunlight. Enemy invaders are lurking beneath the surface of that water, because this particular enemy is everywhere in coastal New England. They are, in fact, the reason for our visit to the large, modern building to our left, the headquarters of Legal Sea Foods, a company with about three dozen restaurants from Massachusetts to Georgia.
With me on this expedition is Heather Atwood, a food writer from Rockport. We’re here to meet with Legal Sea Foods executive chef Rich Vellante, and we’ve brought him a gift: a plastic tub full of alien invaders, or Carcinus maenas, commonly known as green crabs, pulled that morning from my trap in the waters off Ipswich, where I live. Two to three inches wide across the shell, green crabs are not native to New England. But they’ve been multiplying like crazy recently, wiping out vast colonies of other coastal species along the way, including mussels and commercially valuable clams.
A couple of chefs involved in menu development at Legal meet us in the lobby. They peer into the tub at the critters — small and green, with 10 legs apiece, eyeballs on protuberant stalks — then lead us through offices and a vast warehouse-like storage area to a small kitchen. Though they’ve never cooked with green crabs before, they are veteran chefs and know what to do. Within minutes, they’ve put about a dozen of the little decapods in a pot on a stove, along with finely chopped onions, carrots, celery, and a little white wine.
Read the full story at the Boston Globe