Louisiana Garlic Crabs

You don’t buy seafood at the supermarket in Chauvin, Louisiana, where the Gulf of Mexico imbues everyday life. You don’t waste any of the Gulf’s bounty, either. “My grandma used to boil spaghetti in oyster water,” says Melissa Martin, a shrimper’s daughter from the tiny bayou town. Crab is the most abundant resource of all. “We do everything that can be done with crab, because it’s everywhere and it’s basically free,” Martin says. “Stewed, stuffed, fried, deviled—you name it.” Like cooks across the South, Martin also tosses boiled crabs into pools of fragrant garlic butter. After a stint in California, she moved to New Orleans, where she helped launch Satsuma Café and began revisiting her family’s country cooking. She asked for recipes from her mother and her five aunts, who were happy to share their secrets. That eventually led Martin to create the Mosquito Supper Club, a Thursday-night pop-up from September to May at which she serves family-style dishes of bayou staples like gumbo, oyster soup, and, naturally, garlic crabs. “In Chauvin, you’d probably get more spices,” she says. “I like to keep things simple.” She’s a practical-minded cook, too. Martin saves the crab-boiling water for other recipes that call for richly flavored stock, like soup or gumbo. “We get all the flavor we can out of our ingredients,” she says.