Nick Bramham’s Crab Tagliatelle with Butter, Pepper, and Garlic
Nick Bramham’s Crab Tagliatelle with Butter, Pepper, and Garlic
A recipe in which there’s no such thing as too much butter. Text and photographs by Nick Bramham.
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Welcome to Vittles Recipes! In this new weekly slot, our roster of six rotating columnists will share their recipes and wisdom with you. This week’s columnist is Nick Bramham. You can read our archive of cookery writing here.
Nick Bramham’s Crab Tagliatelle with Butter, Pepper, and Garlic
Thoughts on defining a restaurant’s identity, and a recipe in which there’s no such thing as too much butter. Text and photographs by Nick Bramham.
I have a confession. At work I cook traditional, often pedantically regionally specific European food – mostly Mediterranean, sometimes in dialogue with North Africa. I established strict rules at the outset about where my influences could be drawn from. I think it’s important for a restaurant to have guidelines, boundaries, a framework within which you can iterate; they provide coherence, a tangible sense of identity.
One of these ground rules was ‘stay out of Asia’ – I wanted to focus on the food of old-world wine-making regions, celebrating the rustic fare of tavernas, caves à vin, osteria, pintxos bars, and felt it appropriate to stick to cuisine relevant to my area of expertise, sensitive as I am to the discourse around cultural appropriation. But last month I put a dish on the menu inspired by something that I’d eaten many years ago in India, and no one noticed.
Trishna in Mumbai is an iconic no-frills restaurant specialising in South Indian seafood. It is perhaps best known for its signature dish, butter pepper garlic crab, in which a jumbo crab is cooked with – and then buried under – a mound of chopped garlic, cracked black pepper, and copious amounts of butter. My not-necessarily 100%-reliable memory of eating it is of a ritualistic, quasi-religious experience, quietly working my way through the crab in the hushed, dimly lit dining room: crack open the shell, smear a spoonful of tomalley on your naan, wrap it around a piece of sweet claw meat, drag the lot through the islands of fragrant garlic and pepper swimming in the molten caramelised butter, and repeat, hoping that it never ends.
I was reminiscing about this incredible dish with a lucky friend who had experienced it himself recently when it struck me. Butter, pepper, garlic, and crab are in pretty much constant rotation at work – and actually, to my mind at least, very Northern Italian. We’ve had several crab pasta dishes on the menu throughout the years – typically leaning more Southern Italian, all bright Amalfi lemon and handfuls of wild fennel – so why not something a bit more gutsy? How good would it be to take picked crab meat, fold it though the garlic and pepper butter sauce, and then toss fresh pasta through it?
Very good, it turns out.
The recipe itself was surprisingly easy to pull together despite being based on a fifteen-year-old memory. Slightly more white crab meat than brown is the ideal ratio. The garlic should be meticulously selected to ensure that it smells fresh, pungent, and deeply savoury – do check that it isn’t ‘corked’ (see notes) – and then cooked carefully and gently in the butter to ensure it doesn’t burn. The pepper should be of the highest quality. Fat, fragrant Tellicherry peppercorns from the Malabar coast in Kerala make the most sense gastronomically and poetically: Malabar was the birthplace of the Western pepper trade over two millennia ago, furnishing Greek and Roman mariners with sacks of what would later become a staple of European tables in exchange for gold coins and amphorae of wine.
This is an extremely decadent dish – here, as in most cases, I don’t think there’s such a thing as too much butter – but one that can be tailored to all occasions. It can involve either quite a bit of work or not much work at all, and is just as suited to a show-offy dinner party project involving hand-made egg-yolk pasta and whole crabs tossed into pots, as to a lazy lunch using pre-picked crab and De Cecco tagliatelle.
It’s the type of thing I can imagine Nigella nonchalantly throwing together at 1am after returning home from an awards bash – a dish of heightened deliciousness, luscious in texture, and featuring just a handful of different ingredients (admittedly each used with absolutely wild abandon), a steaming plateful of pure sensory pleasure.
Crab tagliatelle with butter, pepper, and garlic
