Now, the tricky part. It's a difficult task, but definitely worth it.

Place the cooked crab on its back and twist off each of the legs and claws, and place to one side.

Isolate the two sections of the body - the hard shell on the top of the creature and the other bit of the body - and prise the two apart. The main body section will have a lot of hard internal bits of shell, in small chambers, and mostly white meat, and the larger bit of the shell will be quite full of brown meat.

In the larger bit of shell, there will be the creature's stomach - a grey-white sack - behind its mouth. Discard this and remove the long, white, weird-looking "dead man's fingers" - the gills - from the body section. These are indigestible and horrible but fairly easy to remove in their entirety.

Using your fingers and then a skewer, remove the white meat from the body cavity, trying not to break too much shell or membrane off and instead pushing the meat out through the cavities. This takes a while.

Do the same with the shell - remove all of the meat, and place in a bowl.

Crack open all of the claws and legs and poke the meat out with a skewer.

Pick over and sort through the meat well, to remove any hard bits - there's little less pleasant than a sharp bit of crunchy shell in soft, sweet crabmeat.