My father was nominally a Catholic, but a bad one when it came to its observances. He had his own set of rituals and they revolved around cooking, each meal with its own set of rubrics.

The first instruction for spaghetti and crabs was to buy the blue claws, a task easily accomplished by making a trip to the crab shack that still can be found on Mount Ephraim Avenue in Woodlynne. But I do vaguely recall once driving to Delaware, perhaps because the shack's shipment had not come in yet or my father was not satisfied with the size of the available crabs. Oh, and jimmies only.

Once provisioned with the necessary ingredients, including bread from the Erlton Bakery on Marlton Pike in Camden, we would return home in the early afternoon. Now where most people steam their crabs, my father's preparations were more elaborate. He would kill and clean them before cooking.

This operation, carried out in the shade of our house in the backyard, required tongs, a sturdy blade, and, if needed, a hammer. In the late 1960s or 1970s, my father introduced a rectangular cleaver with a round wooden handle he obtained from an acquaintance who happened to own a Chinese restaurant in Cherry Hill.

Grabbing a crab with the tongs, my father would place it on its back on a chopping block on the picnic table, and using the natural line on the blue claw's belly as a guide, he would split it in two. If the cut did not go all the way through, he would tap the blade with a hammer to finish the job. As the cleaver went in, the crab's claws moved inward, seemingly reaching for the metal, only to fall when the action was completed. Legs often twitched briefly afterward. The halves were then collected and taken to the kitchen, where the back shell and innards were removed under running water.

Now it was time to cook.

Before dealing with the crabs, my father would make a basic marinara sauce of garlic, oil and crushed tomatoes.

As the sauce simmered, my father would saute the crabs in garlic and olive oil, seasoning them with salt, pepper and fresh parsley, until the claws turned red. The same year my father got the Chinese cleaver, he also started using a wok, a pan that would not come into popular usage until some time later. After they were sauteed, the crabs were put in the marinara sauce to simmer for an hour or two.

Once a green salad had been prepared and the spaghetti - not linguine - had been cooked, it was time to tuck in.

I have never known a messier meal. Even though the crabs had been cleaned, they were now drenched with tomato sauce. Hands and faces were soon smeared red, and over the years we must have used a forest of paper towels in an effort to not look like complete barbarians.

But it also was one of the tastiest meals. The influence of the crabs on the gravy was sublime, and the sauce made the crabmeat soft and sweet. Truly a treat to look forward to once a year, a movable feast day determined by the chef's whim.

It was not until I went to college that I had crabs the way most people do, steamed in the shell with Old Bay.

As an adult, I have not had spaghetti and crabs as frequently as I did as a youngster. The crabs also seem much smaller, which means more have to be killed and cleaned to get the same amount of meat my father did. Be that as it may, I still get a craving from time to time, and have found myself getting up on a late summer morning and announcing that today is a spaghetti and crabs day.