Carolina Fried Soft-Shell Crabs

SERVES 4 - START TO FINISH: about 15 minutes

Recipe Directions

1 cup cornmeal
1 cup plain flour
8 soft-shell crabs, cleaned*
1 teaspoon salt, or to taste
½ teaspoon black pepper, or to taste
½ cup vegetable oil

Begin heating oil over medium heat in a heavy, 12-inch skillet (such as cast iron). Combine cornmeal and flour in a mixing bowl. Sprinkle crabs lightly with salt and pepper to taste, and dredge in cornmeal-flour mixture.

Raise heat to medium-high. Add crabs to hot oil, shaking each one lightly to remove excess flour. Panfry until golden brown on both sides, about 3 to 5 minutes per side. Serve immediately.

* Cooking Notes

If crabs are frozen, defrost according to package directions.

Backstory

We’ve slightly interpreted this recipe (to give a few extra cooking details), but it originated with Percy and Loraine Jenkins of Sneads Ferry, N.C., who ran the Riverview Café there for 38 years. Beverly grew up eating at the Riverview on summer weekends (the 45-minute drive to get there was part of the charm).

Our good friends Kathy Hart and Nancy Davis combed North Carolina’s coastal communities in search of traditional recipes when they worked for the University of North Carolina Sea Grant Program. Their cookbook, Coastal Carolina Cooking, first published in 1986 by The University of North Carolina Press, contains the Jenkins’ unedited soft-shell crab recipe, which has only two sentences of cooking instructions.

It would be entirely possible to narrow those cooking instructions even more: Get fresh soft-shells and fry them. From that, most anyone who grew up in Sneads Ferry would know exactly what to do. The rest of us are glad to have the cookbook. You can still find used copies of Coastal Carolina Cooking on Amazon.com. Just click the link above.

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