Like spaghetti bolognaise, hairy crab is not a great dish for a first date. It spits and squirts as you tear it apart, suck out the bright orange roe and poke meat out of its spindly legs. It's easy to end up wearing it - and a liberal sprinkling of saffron-coloured crab oil is not a good look. But it's delicious, and in October diners' thoughts in Shanghai and Hong Kong are focused on 'mitten crabs', as the Shanghai hairy crab is also known. This year the crabs are particularly good.
Hairy they definitely are, with distinctive golden fringes on their muddy green legs. The most famous home of the freshwater crustaceans is Yangcheng Lake near Suzhou, a 90-minute drive from Shanghai in Jiangsu province. The Mid-Autumn Festival usually marks the start of the peak season, lasting through October, when the prized females are full of roe. From late October to the end of the year, males are deemed superior.
This year Yangcheng's crop got a few days reprieve, and piles of steamed crabs were missing from many family reunion tables in the Yangtze River Delta. The Yangcheng Lake Crab Association in Suzhou announced that this year's crab fishing season was delayed until September 17, five days after the Mid-Autumn Festival. Any crafty crab farmer trying to sneak in a few early ones to catch the festival price rise would not be entitled to call them Yangcheng Lake crabs.
Traditionally, the price of crabs from this area rises 10 to 20 per cent annually, and this year is no exception. Last year, the prices of crabs, often sold in male and female pairs, with females slightly lighter than males, peaked at more than 250 yuan (HK$304) in December.
The good news, according to the crab association, is that this year's crabs are bigger and better quality than last, due to the spring drought in Jiangsu province. The Yangcheng Lake's water level dropped from two metres to 1.5 metres, which allowed more sunshine into the water, creating a better environment for the hairy crabs to mature.
Sonny Gao, proprietor of Lu-shan Framing and Interiors in Shanghai, is taking me to her favourite Shu You restaurant at 2399 Hongqiao Road near her shop. Her son Joshua, five, is much less impressed with the rows of dark green bamboo-bound live crabs than his mother. We elect to have our victim turned into ginger and onion fried crab, or jiang cong chao xie, priced at 158 yuan.