Drunken Crab

01

Raw drunk or cooked drunk

The color of the shell tells you which kind is on the plate.

Shēngzuì (生醉), raw drunk, starts with live crabs. They are cleaned, tied and put straight into the wine brine, where they stay for a day or more. The shell keeps its greenish color, and the roe of a female crab stays soft and molten, almost like sea urchin, the texture that makes raw drunken crab so prized. Shúzuì (熟醉), cooked drunk, starts by steaming the crabs. They come out orange-red, are cooled, and then soak in the brine for about a day. The meat is firm and the roe sets solid, but the wine, soy and spices work their way into both.

Both are served cold as a starter, whole or halved, with a little of the brine poured over. You eat them with your fingers, sucking the brine out of the legs. In Shanghai, raw drunken crab made in a restaurant or shop kitchen is now illegal, so the bright orange crab on most restaurant menus is the cooked kind. A greenish shell means raw.

The wine is almost always Shaoxing yellow wine, and the name on the bottle is usually huādiāo (花雕). Yellow wines are graded by how much sugar they keep, and huadiao is the semi-dry kind: good aged jiāfàn wine was once stored in jars carved with flowers, which is where the name comes from, and today the two names mean much the same thing. Its mellow, slightly sweet depth is what drunken crab tastes of. Cooks often add a spoonful of strong baijiu as well, for a sharper edge.

Sources [3][8][10]

02

Wine crabs from the Song dynasty to Li Yu

Steeping crabs in wine is at least a thousand years old.

Fu Gong’s Crab Manual (蟹谱), written in 1059, gives a recipe for jiǔxiè, wine crabs. Make them in the twelfth lunar month, it says. Skim clear wine from the jar without letting it touch the lees, mix it with salt and soak the live crabs in it overnight. Take them out, clean the dirt from under the navel flap and pack it with pepper and salt, then stack the crabs in a clean vessel. Boil the salted wine once with a little fresh wine, let it cool overnight, and pour it over the crabs until they are covered. The same manual notes that a single evodia seed (茱萸) tucked under the flap of a crab preserved in wine lees keeps it from going “sandy” for a whole year.

Sandy, shā (沙), was the great fear: drunken crab whose flesh had turned grainy and broken down. Six centuries later the playwright and gourmet Li Yu, who ate twenty or more crabs a day in season, passed on a piece of kitchen lore about it in his Xianqing Ouji. Never take drunken crabs out of the jar by lamplight, he wrote, or the whole jar will turn sandy. The cure was to light an oil lamp over the jar from the first day of steeping, night and day, so the crabs grew used to it.

Li Yu relied on wine-pickled crabs to see him through the months when fresh crabs were out of season, and drank the wine afterwards so as not to waste any of the flavor. He still thought steaming was the best way to eat a crab. These old drunken crabs were all raw: live crabs, salt and wine, kept for months.

Sources [1][2][4]

03

Why Shanghai restaurants serve only cooked drunken crab

Since 2023 Shanghai has allowed licensed factories to make drunken crab all year, but not restaurants.

Shanghai keeps a municipal list of foods that may not be produced or sold. Its current version, issued in December 2023, bans dead river crabs outright. It also forbids shops and restaurants from making their own raw drunken shrimp, drunken crab, drunken sesarmid crab, salted crab or drunken mud snails, and from serving self-made qiàng xiā, shrimp dressed raw at the table. The ban on restaurant-made raw drunken crab is long-standing and was kept.

What changed in 2023 was the rule for food factories. They used to be allowed to make drunken shrimp and crab only in certain seasons; the new notice lets licensed producers make them all year, with more monitoring and testing promised in return. So factory-made drunken crab from licensed producers can be sold in Shanghai, while restaurant kitchens may make only the cooked kind.

Sources [3][5]

04

What wine does not kill

Alcohol, salt and soy sauce do not make raw crab safe.

The main worry with raw freshwater crab is the lung fluke, Paragonimus. Its cysts live in the flesh of stream crabs and crayfish, and people pick them up by eating those animals raw or half-cooked. Hangzhou’s disease-control doctors put it bluntly: salting and steeping in wine do not kill the cysts. Even a week in liquor leaves them alive, while boiling water kills them easily, and crab that is only partly cooked is still half-raw. In June 2008 an outbreak in Taizhou, Zhejiang, was traced to raw drunk crabs made from stream crabs; sixteen people who had eaten them fell ill, an attack rate of 87.5 percent, after an average of five days.

The same doctors point out that farmed crabs generally do not carry the parasite, and that stream crabs are the real danger. Farmed hairy crabs are the usual drunken crab in Shanghai, so the risk is lower than with wild crabs, but it is not zero. The safest choices are cooked drunken crab, made with crabs steamed all the way through, or raw drunken crab from a licensed producer. Never make drunken crab from dead crabs.

Some chefs have looked for a middle way. Parasite cysts are killed by a combination of temperature and time, not only by boiling: a minute at 100 °C, or around twenty minutes at much lower temperatures. One chef seals live-stunned hairy crabs in vacuum bags with the brine and holds them at 65 °C for twenty minutes before chilling and steeping them. The shell stays greenish and the roe stays soft, though the meat is no longer raw. It needs a thermometer and careful timing, so for most home cooks steaming the crabs through remains the reliable choice.

Sources [6][7][10]

06

Cooked drunken crab at home

The brine takes ten minutes; the crabs need a day in it.

Sources [6][8][9]