Crab on Toast

The fishmonger had crab on Saturday. A good one, heavy for its size, which is what you're looking for. I carried it home in a paper bag, set it on the kitchen counter, and had lunch sorted before the kettle boiled.

Crab on toast is not really a recipe. It's an assembly. A negotiation between the sweetness of white meat, the deep, savoury richness of brown, and a piece of toast good enough to carry both. The lemon does what lemon always does: it wakes everything up. The butter on the toast melts into the bread and meets the crab halfway. A recipe is a conversation, not a contract. This one is barely a paragraph.

I don't know a better way to eat crab. In a restaurant, they'll put it in a tian or fold it into a bisque or do something architectural with an avocado. All unnecessary. The best crab I've ever eaten was on a piece of toast at a kitchen table, with the window open and the afternoon going nowhere in particular. I wrote it down in the notebook: crab, toast, lemon, May. It didn't need more than that.

There are few better feelings than putting a plate of this in front of someone. The look on their face when they realise how simple it is, and how good. We're only making dinner.