“A scourge,” says chef Jean-Michel Querci to begin with. A scourge, certainly, but a scourge that he puts in his pots. In soup or with pasta, this 47-year-old Corsican cook has adopted the blue crab, an invasive species that is gaining ground in the Mediterranean, for some of his recipes. Owner of two restaurants in Saint-Florent, at the foot of Corsica, which had it on the menu, the chef now only manages a cannery with, of course, a blue crab soup.
“Its flesh is between spider crab, very fine and tasty and the flavor of crab,” explains Jean-Michel Querci, who gives the recipes. “The problem is that it takes quite a long time to dissect. To make it with pasta, you must first cook it, then peel it and keep only the most beautiful pieces. For the soup, it’s the opposite: we peel it raw, then we flambé it with rum and we spice it with colombo by adding potatoes and carrots. A preparation reminiscent of the West Indies, where my cook comes from and where blue crab is common. »
Eat or be eaten
Recipes developed at the request of the Environment Office which commissioned the chef in 2022 to try to popularize the consumption of this crab, which is also a source of damage among fishermen. “For some, particularly on the Bastia side, where there is a pond – a configuration appreciated by blue crabs – fishermen hardly catch sea bass or sea bream anymore. There are crabs everywhere and they break the nets. It’s a disaster,” worries the chef.
A crustacean that can measure up to 15 centimeters, a size that no endemic Mediterranean crab reaches and which can also be found on the menu ofa handful of mainland restaurants but also in Italy. It is not said that the consumption of this invasive resource is sufficient to contain its proliferation, however good (although time consuming to prepare) it may be.
Our 20 Minutes Under the Sea file
The exploitation of new Mediterranean species is obviously not limited to the blue crab alone. Of the Turkish restaurateurs serve, for example, rabbit fisha voracious herbivore measuring around ten centimeters from the Red Sea, now common in this eastern part of the Mediterranean basin.