Ingredients
1 stephen ceideburg
2 green onions, chopped
1 piece fresh ginger, 2-3 cm, grated
4 tbsp dry sherry
3 tbsp light soy sauce
3 blue crabs
400 g glutinous rice
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp oil
1 tsp sugar
Directions
The Chinese have comfort food, too, and this dish qualifies. You will
need a large steamer; if you don't yet have one, they can be bought
cheaply in large Chinese or Vietnamese food stores where you can also
pick up the glutinous rice. The dish takes considerably longer to
cook than the previous recipes but little more of the cook's time. By
the time the rice is cooked, it is saturated with crab flavour.
Finely chop 2 green (spring) onions and grate 2-3 cms of fresh ginger.
Combine them with 4 tablespoons dry sherry and 3 tablespoons light soy
sauce. Prepare three green blue swimmers crabs. Chop two of them into
several pieces with a large knife or cleaver and crack the hardest
pieces of the shell with a hammer. Crack the third crab thoroughly
all over but do not chop up. Pour the sherry-soy sauce mixture over
the crabs and leave to marinate for an hour. Wash 400 grams glutinous
rice in several changes of water until the water runs clear.
Put the rice into a saucepan and pour over it 1.5 L water. Bring to
the boil and boil for 5 minutes. Drain.
In the bottom of a heatproof dish at least 12 cm deep and of a size
to fit into your steamer, pack in the chopped crab pieces, reserving
the marinade. Pour the rice over the top and pack it down. Press the
intact crab into the top of the rice. To the marinade, add a further
tablespoon soy sauce and a tablespoon oil, teaspoon salt and 1
teaspoon sugar. Pour over the crabs and rice.
Put the dish in the steamer over boiling water and steam for 35-40
minutes. Serve. Diners deal first with the top crab, now half buried
in rice, then fish around, for the rest of the crab pieces in rice.
From an article by Meryl Constance in The Sydney Morning Herald,
5/18/93. Courtesy Mark Herron.
Servings: 6 servings
Chinese Crab Rice Recipe brought to you by Recipe Ideas
Categories: Asian; Chinese; Crab; Fish; Rice
The History of Recipes
It is quite possible to follow the history of transcribed cooking instructions far back into ancient history, in fact as far as the Egypt of the Pharoahs, and possibly even further than that. However, in the main part, these early recipes were just simple hieroglyphic or cunieform recipes for preparing food.
In fact, the most ancient recipe discovered, according to academics are some stone tablets in ancient Sumerian which describe the baking of bread which is then used to make a drink, quite possibly a form of beer as it is recorded as having made people feel `blissful`. Progressing into Roman times around 25BC a roman called Apicius created a collection of scripts showing how to cook the recipes prepared by wealthy roman citizens. He describes how the meals of wealthy Romans were separated into starters, main course and dessert, something we still use today. He also tells us how the ancient Romans made use of a wide range of spices, including a few that will be familiar to modern chefs like bay, fennel and parsley. Later on, there were two books published in the 14th Century - a cookery book titled `Forme of Cury`, and another, similary entitled `Curye on Inglish`. Surprisingly, they are unconnected to the indian food that is familiar to us all today, but rather descriptions of the types of meals on the tables of the nobility of that time. Later on in the 1400s, people returning from the crusades brought us many new foods and spices from the holy lands, such as coriander, parsley, and rosemary. These new herbs and spices was responsible for a torrent in publications on food, most of which are now in academic collections. The introduction of the TV gave us celebrity TV chefs and the demand for the spin-off recipe books. And that neatly brings us to the present day and the invention of computers and the internet, permitting everyone to search through massive numbers of recipes just like those on this web site. |
We hope you enjoy this Chinese Crab Rice recipe.
