Crab curry is at once exotic, delicious, spectacularly beautiful and simple to prepare. Seafood curries are a personal favorite, so I asked my friend Leela Manilal to share her crab recipe. She was happy to do so; especially since she’s a longtime fan of our local San Francisco Dungeness crabs, and still thrills at a visit to Fishermen’s Wharf for the just-off-the-boat delicacy. We headed to Alioto’s outdoor stand where the fishmonger cleaned and cracked several beauties that we would eat out of the shell.

As he worked, Leela confided that “Dungeness crabs are so much nicer and sweeter than those horrible little green creatures that we get in Delhi”. She told how they are shipped hundreds of miles inland from the coastal regions of Mumbai and southern India and sold live from buckets in local markets. Leela giggled and related the chaos that ensues when the little critters escape, sending shoppers scurrying as clerks attempt to recapture their wares. Being no stranger to Indian markets, I had to admit how spoiled we are in San Francisco with this beautiful wharf and the promise of a walk by the bay once we collect our tidily wrapped crabs.

Crab curry is a fairly quick, easy assembly when you prep the garlic, ginger, onions, spices, tomato, coconut milk and tamarind before beginning. With everything ready at hand, you can focus all of your attention on the fine art of creating the gravy, adding liquid bit-by-bit and tasting as you go.

Most all of the ingredients for this dish are available at good local markets. You can find ghee (a form of clarified butter) and tamarind paste (an acid much like citrus, made from the pods of the tamarind tree) at Indian grocery stores or online. Western cooks often use vegetable oil for their Indian dishes, and this is perfectly acceptable. But ghee imparts a taste and aroma not otherwise possible. Its addition is well worth a trip to the store.

Tamarind paste may give you the culinary heebie-jeebies the first time you encounter it. Twenty-five years ago, Leela handed me a jar of black, gooey mystery stuff that made me question if it was safe to eat. Be brave! Take off the lid and give it a sniff. Tamarind paste smells a little like raisins and is used extensively in Indian curries and chutneys.

Once you’re in the kitchen and things are sizzling, keep in mind what Leela taught me years ago: Adding liquids a little at a time makes all the difference in Indian cooking. Stir and let the liquid absorb the flavors and reduce before adding more. If you pour all the coconut milk or water in at once, the gravy becomes diluted and runny. Patience equals perfection.

When Leela and I made this crab curry, I was surprised that the gravy was not the usual red or golden color but a deep chocolate brown. Yummy and smooth, but not visually pretty. When plating the finished dish, fill a serving platter with hot Basmati rice then arrange the orange-tinged crab pieces on top. Spoon the gravy into the crevices and then drizzle over the top. Don’t pour it freely or everything will swim in brown. Decorate the crab curry with chopped green cilantro and lots of lime pieces for spritzing—and color contrast.

Dig in! At my table we don’t stand on formalities with crab curry. Within seconds the room fills with the sounds of breaking shells, lip smacking and moans of pleasure as we lick the scrumptious gravy off our fingers. Truth is we make absolute pigs of ourselves. During all of this, Leela looked up with crab leg in hand and said, “will you teach me how to make chocolate ganache? I want to master truffles.” I agreed and grabbed another leg. Stay tuned.

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Carbonara is an Italian classic that first appeared in the 1940s—exactly where is debated by food historians. My favorite theory has the Allied soldiers of World War II sharing their humble rations of powdered eggs and bacon with the local, hungry population of war-torn Italy. The Italians supplied dried pasta, and together they all prepared a dish that both nourished and gave them a sense of community. The soldiers became so fond of pasta carbonara that when they returned home to their respective countries, they introduced the dish to their families and local restaurants. These days you’ll find all kinds of spaghetti carbonara on restaurant menus; dressed up with cream and onions or speckled with peas. But traditional cooks—and I’m one of them—swear by five simple ingredients: pasta, cured meat, cheese, eggs and black pepper.

Alas, simplicity is often complicated with unnecessary snobbery as some cooks insist that only specific cured meats and cheeses merit the name carbonara. In Italy, particularly Rome, diners prefer their locally available guanciale and push it as the only true cured meat for carbonara. This very fatty, mild-tasting meat is made from unsmoked pig’s cheeks or jowls and must be cut in small, matchstick pieces to capture the striations of meat. While reasonably priced at six dollars a pound at my local Italian market, guanciale is often hard to find and requires an adventurous spirit.

My favorite is pancetta, an unsmoked, flavorful Italian bacon that adds tasty morsels of meat to the carbonara rather than crunchy pieces of fat. It runs around 16 dollars a pound—or eight bucks for this recipe—and is well worth the extra expense.

If you want to send food snobs wickedly over the edge, use readily available smoked slab bacon (that reminds one of bacon and eggs for breakfast). It costs around seven dollars a pound, or $3.50 for this dish. I don’t know about you, but if I get a hankering for carbonara and can’t have my favorite pancetta, I’ll fry up bacon in a heartbeat.

The cheese is fairly easy. Italians often prefer percorino romano; a salty sheep’s milk. Others—myself included—like parmesan-reggiano, the richly flavored, nutty tasting cow’s milk cheese from Parma, Italy. Try them both and then decide your favorite; you may even want to mix them up. Spaghetti is most common pasta used, but fettuccini, penne and rigatoni are also great choices.

Once you select your ingredients, there are a few tips you need for preparing out-of-this world pasta carbonara.

1. Start with perfectly cooked pasta. Cook it in ample water with a handful of salt. Master this cooking technique and your pasta will be restaurant quality.

2. Grate your cheese from larger pieces; do not waste your money on flavorless supermarket cheese in a shaker container.

3. Add the raw eggs to your hot pasta off the heat of the stove, or you risk scrambled eggs. Tasty but ugly.

4. Create a creamier sauce by adding a few tablespoons of the hot pasta cooking water. Don’t add too much water or your pasta will be swimming.

5. Fry the small pieces of meat slowly on a medium to medium-low flame to render them of their fat. You want the meat crispy, not charred—especially with guanciale.

6. Add several tablespoons of the rendered fat to the pasta—not all of it, as some meats release far too much fat to work well.

7. Keep to the five traditional ingredients: pasta, cured meat, cheese, eggs and black pepper. Less is more.

Perfetto!

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Print a copy of my Spaghetti Carbonara and How To Cook Perfect Pasta for your convenience.