Crab Christmas in Golden Gate Park

It's so nice, in the spectrum of entertaining (and being entertained), to encounter hosts who take pleasure in their duties; who have things in control yet are able to enjoy the company of their guests. Hosts who can distance themselves from the cooking or cleaning long enough to be part of the party. This is, in my mind, one of the greatest skills a person can possess. Yesterday my friend Jen proved herself to be a hostess of this variety as she pulled off a stunning crab boil in the Polo Fields at Golden Gate Park. It was hard to believe that this was the first time she'd spearheaded the San Francisco Dungeness Crab holiday tradition.

With just the morning's notice, Jen gathered a lucky group of 10 on a balmy, grey Saturday afternoon, the second day of 2010. Her team of sous helped her to light charcoal fires on the two picnic grills, and to set up a soup pot on each filled with carrots, onions, garlic, and pepper to infuse the cooking liquid.

She then managed to keep her fingers while humanely lowering live crabs that she'd picked up on Clement St. into the boiling water. She was very concerned about minimizing trauma for each crab as it entered the pot, which made my enjoyment of splashing beer in the crabs' mouths seem especially cold-hearted. (Context will help here: we tried to race the giant crabs across our picnic tables while we waited for the water to boil, and figured they could use a little fuel to light the fire under their butts).

Jen had grander aspirations than just crab: We went through a careful and thorough process of timing the entry and extrication of each crab from the boiling water in tandem with several rounds of vegetables --asparagus, potatoes and corn cobs--getting their turn to cook up in the crab pots.

It was too hard to resist biting into the steaming carrots as they were removed from the broth and stood waiting for the feast--they were soft and infused with faint yet pleasant "eau de crab".

The only thing that wasn't top notch was the corn- quite the contrary. I should have known better, when biting into it, than to expect good corn (isn't it a shame that crab and corn season occupy opposite ends of the calendar?) The kernels were hard, gluey, and tasted like bubble gum. Into the grove of trees they were launched.

Jen insisted in her gentle way that we rinse the crab and veggies that had been sitting out since the first round of cooking with the hot liquid right before serving, so they'd all be warmed and saturated anew in a brine of boiling crab water. The final bowls of crab and veggies were beautiful in that rustic, picnicky, steam in my face way.

We feasted as the sun shed less and less light until, by the end, we were cracking crab in the full darkness. Naturally, the merit of the body meat versus the claw meat was debated....discussion ceased as each eater attacked crab parts in their own unique way, and as the bowl of shells grew increasingly full. Even the most die-hard crackers had to finally call it quits and accept the uneaten crab as promise of tomorrow's cold crab salad.