Portuguese crab with red wine -- looking for a recipe

[cteavin]

Hi,

My father's from the Azores and when he was in the kitchen, I ate well. One of the dishes I remember most fondly was his crab. I wasn't into cooking when I was younger, so I didn't pay enough attention to be able to recall a recipe. What I do remember is that he boiled it with red wine. I recall onions and parsley in the pot, and perhaps allspice and bay leaf in the mix.

I have no idea what such a dish could be called but I recently had crab (prepared in the Japanese way) and I got nostalgic.

Does anyone have an idea of the kind of recipe I'm looking for? Can anyone name a dish or point me in the right direction?

Thank you,

Edited January 5, 2013 by heidih (log)

[seabream]

Hi cteavin, I grew up in Portugal but don't recall a dish where crab was boiled with red wine. I searched my favorite Portuguese recipe websites, google.pt and my small collection of Portuguese cookbooks with no luck. However, I can tell you some of the ingredients that would be typical and that would make crab taste "Portuguese" to me. Red wine, onions, parsley and bay leaf, as you mentioned, are present in many Portuguese savory dishes. Same with garlic. Allspice is not so common. Paprika is very common, and some people use cumin too (mostly paired with meat though). Green peppers are common, as well as red wine vinegar and lemon. Chopped Portuguese sausage (chourico mainly, but in the US I would use linguica) is also added to many dishes, even if the dish contains fish/shellfish. And piri piri chillies are also used a lot (in the US I would substitute with Thai bird's eye chillies). If you can't find a recipe for your father's crab dish, hopefully this will help you guess what may have been in it.

[cteavin]

Thank you for the reply and all the trouble. I'm starting to think my father might have been an experimenter. :-)

Do you (or does anyone) have a favourite crab recipe, perhaps one that uses white wine or some other alcohol?

[johnnyd]

I'm thinking it was a wine reduction for a sauce and I bet there was butter involved

[LindaK]

David Leite's The New Portuguese Table has a recipe for a crab salad that uses the usual minced celery and carrot, bound by a combo of milk mayonaise, piri piri sauce, and brandy. According to him, it's traditionally served in the crab shell. He serves his with a white gazpacho.