I live in Los Angeles where you can get pretty much anything you want, except for one thing I covet: Chesapeake Bay steamed crabs. I grew up in Baltimore and I miss the crab feasts of my youth. So, every year my thoughtful husband has a bushel Fed-x’ed out to Santa Monica in either May, June, July or August (because crabs are good only in months lacking an “r” ). And we invite nostalgic ex-pats and brave newcomers into our West Coast yard to indulge in the pagan ritual that is so cherished back in Maryland, officially The Land of Pleasant Living.
However, if things continue the way they’re going, unfortunately even those still dwelling in the Land of Pleasant Living will be left with a raving craving. Last year, Maryland had the lowest blue crab harvest since 1945. There are only about 120 million crabs in the bay and apparently that may not be enough for a sustainable population. Overfishing, pollution, and yes, global warming are the causes. There seems no end to George W. Bush’s pillage. So it is all the more fitting and important that I sing in praise of the joyful, toothsome oceanic bacchanalias of my childhood.
Growing up in Baltimore, crab feasts were as much a part of summer as pool parties and fireworks on the fourth of July. A screened-in porch was the ideal location but at my house we had our feasts out in the open in the backyard at the redwood picnic table with the mosquitoes. But we didn’t notice the mosquitoes because eating crabs is like being in love. It’s like great sex or being visited by the Muse. It’s like the line in Tonight from “West Side Story”: I saw you and the world went away.
In my case, I saw a dozen steamed crabs caked with Old Bay seasoning piled on top of newspaper, and the world went away. It’s not just me. Y’all become absorbed at a crab feast the way you would if you were painting a masterpiece, or a piece of pottery at Color Me Mine. There isn’t a lot of talking because everyone is very, very busy. Sure, there’s occasional giggling when you get an especially sweet morsel. Participants at a crab feast frequently act like they’re stoned. There’ll be a ‘wow!” here and there. Oohs and aahs. But mostly contented murmuring: My, my. I got a big juicy piece of back fin. Can I eat the mustard? Who has the paper towels? This one’s sweet. Do you want another Natty Boh? Natty Boh is the local brew, short for National Bohemian, and sold exclusively in Maryland.
To prepare for a typical crab feast, blue crabs from the Chesapeake Bay are bought steamed and crusted with spice, usually from a hole in the wall carry-out joint. These establishments pay commercial fishermen, or they might just hire a few kids to bait a crab trap with a chicken leg, tie it to a rope and throw it over one of the many bridges on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The average Baltimorean pulls up in a car, runs into the hole-in-the-wall and returns with a big brown paper bag of steaming hot females (Sooks) or most likely males (Jimmies) so that the females will be left in the bay to reproduce (we hope).
Once home, newspaper is laid on picnic tables. You might have crab soup to start, or sliced tomatoes drizzled with olive oil on the side, or corn on the cob. Or maybe not. Maybe just the crabs and the beer. You’re given wooden mallets, possibly nutcrackers and butter knives, and a roll of paper towels. In a restaurant, they spread out brown butcher paper and give you a bib. A pile of spice-smeared crabs is thrown down on the table. You select a hot slathered crab with your bare hands, yank off the two big claws and then the smaller legs—these are saved for soup, or sucked like summer grass.
Then you find the apron or what we always called “the key.” The key is a lever; a convenient pop top built into the back of the crab by Nature, the mother of invention. You flip the key and the outer shell opens like the lid of a treasure chest, which indeed it is. Inside you find the body of the crab that encases the choicest back fin crab meat. Lick out the tasty yellow mustard if you are inclined, shove aside the tiny dollhouse intestines and yank off the gills, throw those away and then snap the cleaned-up body neatly in half. Break away the delicate shell encasing each half and pull out chunky lumps of white meat flavored with the rust-colored Old Bay spice that’s gotten all over your hands. Be careful not to cut your fingers on the shells.
Take a mallet and whack a claw or two, pick out the meat, then onto the next crab. Until you find yourself saying: “I couldn’t possibly eat another one.” You are sated. And yet you are not stuffed, or disgusted with yourself. Instead, you feel wonderful. Because crabs are all protein and a little natural healthy cholesterol and think of the calories you burned just to pull out a succulent lump. At a crab feast, you can pig out without being a pig.
My most memorable crab feast took place somewhere in the Northeast corner of Maryland close to the Delaware border, in between Rising Sun and Havre de Grace. I was a counselor at Camp Ramblewood on the mouth of the Susquehanna River and it was my night off, as well as my boyfriend’s. I had a bunk of eight year old girls and he had a bunk of eight year old boys. That night we were free of our charges, we were not O.D. (on duty) and my friend Lisa came to visit with a bag of Silber’s cookies. But that’s another Baltimore culinary story, a story that involves the best cookies in the entire world bar none, but that no longer exist because of a rat mistakenly baked into a Challah.
Back to the crabs. Cole, my boyfriend, drove us into the countryside in his gold VW bug. There was no moon that night. No moon at all. It was, as they say, pitch black. The lush Maryland foliage was a black curtain on either side of us blocking any light that might have come from a distant farmhouse or a 7-Eleven, so that all we saw illuminated by our headlights was the bright yellow line down the center of the road. It was pitch black (did I mention that?) and Cole was trying to find some backwoods crab shack from memory. The road was switching this way and that way like a yellow-striped snake and I didn’t think we would ever find the place or for that matter find our way back to camp. We were hungry. We were starving. We ate the Silber’s cookies. We thought we were lost. Fortunately, the “Blair Witch Project” was thirty years from production.
Just when I was about to break up with Cole for driving us into oblivion, out of the blackness a vision appeared dancing on a string in the night breeze: red, yellow, green and pink Japanese lanterns glowing through the dark woods like every promise that’s ever been broken, newly redeemed. We’d found it. A shack with a stove, picnic tables, gaily lit paper lanterns. And dozens upon dozens of blue crustaceans steamed red and smothered in Maryland’s dry rub secret sauce: Old Bay. We climbed out of the VW bug, hungry and grateful. The night air was thick as velvet. (No kidding.) A kind woman dumped some crabs on the table in front of us. We murmured, we picked away at the crab flesh in the paper lantern light, we licked the spice off our fingers and washed it down with cold beer. Life was good.
My mother had a boyfriend, or really a man friend, or actually just a first and last date who took her out to a restaurant for crabs. She was surprised her date was dressed in a suit, since they were going to be up to their elbows in Old Bay on brown butcher paper. But for him, crabs were serious business. When they arrived at the restaurant, he took a briefcase out of the back seat of the car, brought it inside, laid it down on their table and pressed the latches open with his thumbs. The lid popped up revealing his very own monogrammed Sterling silver crab mallets, crackers, and knives.
My mother liked crabs as much as any Marylander, but she declined a second date. When the drug paraphernalia overpowers the drug, we’re talking OCD. She ate the crabs first, though. Because how often do you get to pig out without being a pig?