I'm Feeling Crabby (it's a good thing)

It’s a rare occasion when Janet and I can get together with our kids and grandkids, now that our kids are grown and raising families of their own. It can be a bit intense with multiple simultaneous conversations and the boundless energy of the grandkids, but I love every minute of it. Janet and I especially like to see our boys interacting with each other as adults, and watching their spouses and kids enjoying each other’s company. The past week was one of those times when the stars aligned to bring us all together. This being summer, and Janet and I being native Marylanders, it was the perfect opportunity for a crab feast. Nothing brings a Maryland family together quite like steamed Chesapeake Bay blue crabs and freshly picked sweet corn. It doesn’t get any better than that.

As I ordered the crabs for this week’s feast it brought me back to when I was a kid, sitting at the picnic table in our back yard with my siblings and picking crabs. It was one of the few times we could all gather around the table and not get into an argument. Mostly because if you were arguing, someone else was grabbing all the crabs.

If you’ve never had the experience of sitting down to a table piled high with steaming hot crabs, it is a treat. Oh sure, picking crabs is tedious. You get a couple of mouthfuls of meat out of a crab that takes you 10 minutes to pick clean, but it’s a sure-fire way to slow things down for a bit. And with today’s hectic lifestyle, we all need more slowing down.

You won’t find a single cell phone at the table during our crab feasts, once the picking begins. Nobody wants to be bothered with texts and social media when a pile of crabs is begging to be picked clean of the sweet, tasty and slightly briny meat that fills their shells. Nor do they want to soil their phones with the seasoning that clings to your hands and stains your fingers orange from the first crab you crack open to the last. It takes days to get your hands clean after a crab feast, but as any native Marylander will tell you...we wear that orange proudly.

Janet’s parents once treated their visiting Nebraska relatives to a crab feast, but I’m not sure they quite got the attraction. What bothered them the most was that they would be flying home the next day, and they couldn’t get the smell of crab seasoning washed off their hands. They were concerned the sight of orange fingers would somehow mark them as unclean…someone to avoid. On the contrary, my father-in-law informed them. Any Marylanders on their plane would be envious.

In our travel business our goal is to leave clients with lifelong vacation memories. That’s what a crab feast does…it leaves you with memories. I remember the first time my mother showed me how to pick crabs. She selflessly let me pick out the easy to find backfin meat, and when I got bored hunting for the bits and pieces of meat hidden throughout the rest of the shell, she let me move on to another crab. My mother would pick through my discard pile as I was hogging the backfin meat. She cleaned out all of meat I had left behind while lovingly chiding me for not being more careful. At least I think it the chiding was loving. Picking crabs is a coming-of-age experience for Marylanders.

Back in my younger years, crabs were priced like the bottom-dwelling detritus eaters they are…cheap. They were abundant and it took little effort to steam them to perfection. Which was a good thing since my parents would never have been able to afford crabs at today’s market prices. As a kid we had crab feasts once or twice each summer. And when I say crab feast, I mean a couple of dozen crabs tossed onto the picnic table along with a dozen or so ears of freshly picked Maryland sweet corn covered in butter, and a coke to wash it all down. Maybe a watermelon for dessert.

For us, that was a treat, and it was followed by a thorough dousing with the garden hose to clean us up and cool us off. Families that were more well to do than ours augmented their crabs with shrimp and grilled steaks or burgers…because nobody gets full eating crabs. And even though as an almost Medicare-eligible adult I can now afford a good steak, crab it is still the only protein on the menu at my crab feasts.

Nowadays a dozen medium sized male crabs, barely enough to satisfy one adult, will set you back between $60-$70. That’s twice the cost of a USDA prime steak. Some Marylanders take matters into their own hands and catch their own, but that's beyond my skills.

Nothing invokes more passion from a native-born Marylander than the topic of crab seasoning. Collectively we call it “Old Bay” but that is a specific seasoning blend marketed by the McCormick spice company.  Truth be told, hardly any respectable crab shack uses McCormick’s Old Bay to season their crabs. Most use their own proprietary seasoning blend, and those that don’t rely on J.O. #2 . The best crab seasoning uses large flake salt, the better to adhere to the crab shells and survive the steaming process, along with a blend of spices like paprika, celery salt, ground red and black peppers, mustard, and optional spices like cloves, ginger and cinnamon. I’ve written about the McCormick Old Bay vs J.O. #2 crab seasoning debate before, and again extend my thanks to fellow Marylander Mike Rowe for setting the record straight.

The great thing about Maryland crabbing is that it gets passed down from one generation to the next. A quality steam pot will look like something salvaged from a junk yard, and the best locations for crabbing are among the most closely guarded of family secrets. Even crab picking technique gets passed along, whether you go for breaking off the legs first or digging right into the inside of the shell. My mother taught us to break off the legs first, feast on any meat that comes off with them, then crack the shell open and tackle the inside, and that’s how I taught my kids.

You can get cheaper blue crabs from waterways outside the Chesapeake Bay, mainly from Louisiana. A local restaurant was recently busted on a television cooking show for serving “Maryland” crab cakes made with canned Vietnamese crab meat. And this establishment was a block away from the water! Sure, you can find “blue” crabs in Vietnam, but they are a different species than our Chesapeake Bay blue crabs with a different taste and texture. And even though blue crabs from Louisiana are the same species as our Chesapeake Bay blues, the difference in terroir leaves our blue crabs tasting sweeter and richer.

Its summertime in Maryland. And although a two-inch thick rib-eye steak cooked to perfection on the backyard grill is cheaper and easier to make a meal out of than a dozen Chesapeake Bay blue crabs, it isn’t nearly as satisfying to the Marylander’s soul. Add a few ears of freshly picked Maryland sweet corn and you’ve got yourself a tradition that has been passed down from the native Algonquins, through the earliest settlers, to today’s Marylanders like me and Janet. And from us now to our kids. What started as a celebration of the abundance of cheap and easy to catch local seafood has become a barely affordable luxury these days, but it is one I look forward to all year.