News and citizen. [volume] (Morrisville, Vt. ;) 1881-current, 1888-07-26
CRABS AND THUNDER.
Why the Soft Shells are so Often
Cheap and Numerous.
[From the New York Snn.l


During much of the past week soft
shell crabs have been unusually abund
ant about town. Nocturnal peddler!
have hawked them about in saloons by
basketfuls; piles of them have appeared
on bars, with the ticket displayed above
| them, " ten cents each;" and even thu
free-lunch caterers have supplied then
to their patrons in quantities. Ter
cents each may appear to afford at least
a fair living profit on good crabs bought
alive in considerable lots at from 40 tC
65 cents dozen, but in reality the
profit on that sort of crabs is small
| Cleaning and cooking them, the mater.
ial employed in breading them, the
| labor of Juggling them all over town to
find purchasers and the Worcestershire
sauce and toast furnished with them, are
considerable items in'the calculations Of
thepeddlers. Saloon keepers, whose trade
teaches them to despise profit of less
than IS per cent, have no use for the
crab business except perhaps as a con-
cession to the requirements of style
where they have to take the trouble of
supplying the delicacy themselves and
know that they cannot make more than
three, or possibly only two cents per
crab.
''But, if the crabs cost so much, asks
the unsophisticated one, chow is it that
the caterers who make O business of sup
plying free lunches to beer shops and
third-rate liquor saloons can afford to
supply them SO lavishly, at about the
same figures that they DO the abomina-
tions already described by THE Sun 2"
Simply by reason of the frequency of
thunder storms within the past week
To those unacquainted with the extreme
nervous susceptibility of the crab, cause
and effect may seem widely separat-
ed in that proposition. but it is
perfectly correct all the same. Let q
Shrewsbury crab grower put aboard a
train for New York 500 dozen of his
largest, finest, fattest crabs, all alive
and wiggling, nicely packed in cool,
wet eel grass. Then let one sharp crack
of thunder roll over the train, and by
the time its echoes have ceased every
crab in the lot will be as dead as any
Pharaoh mummifed 1000 years ago.
''Why does thunder kill them 2" No
body knows any more about the reason
than that it seems to be q fatal shock to
their sensitive minds. But the fact is
that it does so, which is the main
thing.
Those crabs if delivered in New York
alive would have been worth IS cents, OF
perhaps 81 dozen, and even if not
very big ones would have readily COM
manded 40 to 60 cents. But when they
arrive dead, the dealer to whom they are
consigned makes all possible haste to
get rid of them as quickly as possible for
any price he can get, for he knows that
in three or four hours that remaining on
his hands will not only be total loss, but
a nuisance that it will cost him some
thing to get rid of.
The peddlers and free lunch caterers,
who keep a sharp lookout for such bust
ness opportunities, are quickly on hand
to buy up the spoiled crabs If the
about the time that the train was get
ting into Jersey City that they are
still tOlerably fresh, as much three
cents apiece mny be got for the first lots
but the price quickly falls to two cents
one cent, and oven lower.
When bread scraps from hotel and re-
staurant tables, rebaked and rolled fine,
are used instead of cracker dust for
breading, with an Limitation" made
largely of corn starch, and the cooking
is done in a cheap grade of cotton-seod
oil, the profit on this sort of crabs,
even at very low prices, may be consid-
erable. Physicians differ as to the effect
upon the digestive organs of partially
decomposed crabs, some saying. .sthey do
no harm, while others affirm that they
have upon some persons a mildly poison
Gus effect. However that may be, it will
be noticed that the peddlers generally
urge upon their best customers the lib
eral use of Worcestershire sauce with
them. 1t is a singular fact, withal, that
though there are thousands of
dozens of thunder-killed crabs sold in
New York every season, it is extremely
difficult to find man who will admit
that he ever bought one.