She Crab Soup originated in Charleston, South Carolina, in the early 1900s. The original recipe infused the rich, creamy soup with the roe from female blue crabs that populated local waters. Today, roe-laden females aren’t harvested, but the soup is still a popular area dish.

Serve the soup as a main course, or as a side or appetizer for a seafood dinner.

For this recipe, we substitute crumbled cooked egg yolks for the rich roe. The results are still spectacular. Serve the soup as an appetizer, or even a main course on a cool fall or winter evening.

We picked the meat from both fresh crabs straight from trap to cooler, and leftover cooked crabs from earlier meals. Raw or cooked, it doesn’t matter, the crab meat will finish in the creamy base.

Squeeze the body section of a raw crab between your thumb and finger to extract the meat.

A tip for getting the most meat from your crabs is to squeeze the body of the crab between your thumb and first finger to push the meat from the body, then use a rolling pin to squeeze out any meat from the smaller legs.

Crack every section of the claws to remove all of the meat.

Pick the claw meat as you normally would, by first cracking the shell then pulling out the meat from inside. We picked about 18 large crabs to get the meat needed for the soup, a big undertaking, no doubt, but worth it for the finished product.

Picking crab meat might be messy, but the resulting soup is well worth the trouble.