A crab: every bit of its armour is a container for a precious object | Helen Sullivan

It has a complicated face, like an intricate chest of drawers, or a jewellery box: press on this part and it opens to reveal a mouth, on that, and an eye pops out

This is a recipe for moéche, the green, soft-shelled crabs that live in Venetian lagoons: mix a batter of flour, eggs, salt and parmesan cheese in a bucket. Drop live crabs into the batter, which must be cold so that the crabs will feel at home. For 30 minutes, the last of their lives, let the moéche scuttle around in the batter, eating it. Then drop them into a pot of boiling hot oil: self-stuffing crabs.

The moéche are crabs – “true crabs” – that have moulted: they have soft shells for just a few hours, before their exoskeletons turn hard. To climb out of their too-small skins, they fill themselves up with water, so that the carapace splits. Then, they pull every part of themselves from their own skins – from the tips of their legs to their eyeballs.

The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us as if it must have been sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. ‘I am no such thing,’ it would say, ‘I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.’