“How about crabs for supper?” asked our friends Don and Mary Kay. Well, that sounds nice, we thought, imagining neatly dressed crabs lying open on their backs, with perhaps a little salad and mayonnaise tidily arranged beside them, and a slice of two of brown bread and butter, all set off with a lemon quarter, and of course a knife and fork.
Not a bit of it. Maryland Blue Crabs are a wonderfully full-on physical, down-to-earth experience, a finger-licking, chops-smearing, tooth-picking feast for taste and touch and smell. If you crossed all-in wrestling with fine dining, this is what you might get.
The scene is set with a bundle of newspapers brought in from the garage and spread over the kitchen table, onto which is emptied a vast brown paper bag full of crabs, steamed and dusted with Old Bay seasoning, and set off with an array of implements: mallets, screw-drivers and pliers.
A platter of just-picked Maryland maize, so young and fresh that it still has a sweet green flavour to it, to set off the crabs, a quick lesson for the newbies in the tactics of successful dismemberment (in short, “get stuck in, and don’t forget the claws”), and off we go. Ooh, those crabs are good. Salty and fresh and spicy with the seasoning (which doubles as snuff if you sniff it), quite delicious, and all the better for the slightly ruminative atmosphere that develops as we all chase the last sweet fibres of flavour down into the claws and crevices. You can’t have a serious discussion picking crabs, with half your attention focussed on choosing the next spot to attack, and wondering whether you’ve picked that one dry and should move on the next, or is there just a little sweet something lurking in that joint. So we chat in a relaxed way, and eye the growing pile of shells to make sure we haven’t eaten more than our fair share, and lick our fingers, and decide we could just squeeze in one more … and chat again, and realise that essence of crab has found its way slowly up our fingers and around our mouths until we are one cat’s-dream flavoured mess. What a great way to spend an evening.
Thank you, Don and Mary Kay for all your kindness and hospitality, but thank you most of all for introducing us to Maryland Crabs.
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