The Soup Nazi's Crab Bisque

OK, lets start by forgetting about the recent unpleasantness, it didn't happen and any leftovers which there would have been had it happened, which it didn't, are definitely not in my freezer. What? Who said that? Lets move on.
So, what is the Soup Nazi's crab bisque? Ever heard of a little show called Seinfeld? No? Check out a very grainy low quality clip here,
the whole idea of the episode is that there is a guy who makes the best soup in the city, but he will only sell it to you under very specific conditions - people put up with it because the stuff is like crack, apparently... I wouldn't know. I'm not explaining it very well, but if you were as obsessed with this show as I am, and had as big a crush on George, and liked soup at all (which I don't), you would totally get why it was a big deal for me when my bro gave me a book for Christmas which had this recipe. It's a shady looking e-book, which he lovingly printed out and bound, called "Top Secret Famous Recipes". Not for everyone, most of the brands covered are American, so I have no idea what they are (does Yoo-Hoo Mix-Up sound tasty?), but at least I knew who the Soup Nazi was!!
So, first problem, this recipe seems to be written in some kind of gibberish. Here is the ingredients list, and next to it are my educated (?) guesses
4lb snow crab clusters - I got as far as figuring out that 4lb is 2kg, but I'm going to go ahead and assume that 'clusters' is some kind of cute pet name. I got 2 crabs
4qt water (16 cups) - I will never understand what 'cups' are. Tea cup? Espresso cup? Athletic cup? 4 quarts equals to 3.75 litres
1/3 cup tomato sauce - I love the vagueness here as well, Google tells me that 1/3 cup is half a pint, whatever. But what the hell is tomato sauce? Ketchup? Bloody Mary mix? I settled on passata
2T half and half - this is secret code, took me a while. I can just imagine being the hip grandma picking kids off from school and telling them about this hip hop crew I just had a listen of on the old radio. I finally decided to go with 2 tablespoons of semi-skimmed milk (but later found out that it was meant to be 12% cream !?!?!)
1/4 cup of unsalted butter - how do you measure a solid using a cup? Especially when you don't know how big a cup is!
The rest is thankfully pretty straightforward, ordinary, human measurements like 2 cloves of garlic.

The crab you use, I mean Clusters the Crab, is meant to be already cooked when you buy him (and take him home from the pet shop), you need the shells too to make the stock so there's no getting away with just getting a pot of crab meat. I went to a couple of supermarkets, and finally to the fishmonger and the sick bastard only had live ones! Obviously you want fresh produce, but after my little test of faith last time I was having a little trouble thinking about, um... being the one to dispatch them. They weren't moving very much from from having frozen their asses off on a pile of ice all day, but the beedy little eyes were right there!
I named them Sunday and Bacardi (there's totally a cool story behind that) which I absolutely shouldn't have done, because by the time I got them home I realised that I wanted nothing to do with them. It's like when you're at school and you spread a rumour behind someone's back and then you feel really bad, and really don't want them to find out that it was you. Only with murder. I had to get a friend, big tall guy with muscles, to take them out of the bag, wait around while I took the picture, put them in the freezer for 5 minutes to 'fall asleep naturally', and then plop them in the boiling water and close the lid. Phew, what a wimp I am! Once you stare your meal in the eye and try to rationalise why it's ok to kill it just because you want to eat it, it's not so trivial. On the other had if I didn't have any other options, like pizza in the fridge, maybe I wouldn't care so much. Now I get why the Soup Nazi always had such an attitude.
Great, now we can get started proper, I murdered the crabs in the water I was going to use later, to enrich the stock, then you boil the shells with onion anf garlic for an hour, strain, boil for 4 MORE HOURS! add the crab meat and reduce for another hour. That's six hours, in case you can't count, not to count the other hour it took to get the pitiful, pathetic amount of meat out of the fricking crabs, oh and Bacardi was pregnant :(
My brother kept walking around the kitchen, looking into the pot and lamenting that it was all boiling away, which it totally was! In all the liquid must have reduced by about two thirds, and took on a very satisfying golden brown colour.
Result: Ugly picture, amazing soup. So deep, salty, herby and rich. There are 2 teaspoons of mustard seeds in this, and you can really taste the heat, as well as the flavour of the five other herbs that are in this. The crab is incomprable to any of the thin, tinny crap you get in a restaurant, it's amazingly fresh despite the long simmering. Worth it.