With the promise of a crab feast, I spent Saturday with my brother and father when I visited my brother's house in the country outside of Washington. My father was visiting from his new home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. When I first arrived, my brother had been out in his garden, and he had this devil-horned tomato he had found and was chasing me around, waving the tomato at me going "...ooooooooo...the devil tomato is going to get you." Naturally, I ran away from the demon fruit. Funny how we can revert back to childhood so quickly, isn't it?
The Devil Tomato
I went out into the garden to pick vegetables for our dinner, and the yard was full of doves, mockingbirds, hummingbirds, monarch butterflies and bumble bees. Here are some of the things I found:
In the morning my brother had been asked to cook for a picnic where he steamed crabs caught earlier that day in the Bay. I should explain that my brother is a masterful waterman and knows a great deal about boats and fishing. He brought back some of the crabs from the picnic that he had purchased, and these were steamed for our dinner, along with a salad from things we picked in the garden. While we were sitting out on his deck, cracking crabs and watching the debris pile high, I noted that here we were, eating crabs, and talking about crabs, because that is what the talk centered on: our youth out on the water, catching crabs, cleaning fish, tricks for cracking crabs, and other memories that had to do growing up in this region. When I pointed this out, my brother said, "That's what you do. You talk about crabs while eating them."
A friend of mine from Baltimore and I have both laughed over the fact that we were told by our parents, by age five, that we had to know how to crack open a crab ourselves. It's laborious work, with not much reward, but the true pleasure in eating crabs is in the camaraderie. Parents can get weary of little hands reaching out for more crabmeat, when they want to be eating themselves, so a child in this area learns fairly young how to tackle the Maryland Blue.
Here is how my brother steams a bushel of crabs: Using a sixty-quart pot (and his has an insert basket), you place a brick in the bottom of the pot to hold the basket above the fluid line. You pour in one cup of white vinegar and a couple of cans of beer (any type), and you bring the fluid to a boil. Once boiling, you layer the crabs in the basket, sprinkling crab seasoning over each layer, and you steam them for about 20-25 minutes. My brother uses Old Bay seasoning, but Maryland is also famous for Wye River crab spice and some people swear by J.O. Spice Company crab seasoning:
http://www.jospices.com/ Wye River Products
My brother was remembering crabbing at Myrtle Beach when I was about five years old. That was the time he caught the largest crabs ever. When my brother goes crabbing now, the largest crab he might catch is about 8 3/4 inches from tip to tip. That time in South Carolina, on a back bay, he said the crabs caught were pushing 10-11 inches in length, and he's never seen them that large since. My mother couldn't believe when the family came back with these huge crabs, and she made about two crab cakes from one crab, using up the bushel. At that time, there were sand bars in the ocean, and at certain times of day they would create little natural swimming pools that were about two feet deep, which was perfect for my tiny five-year old self. We were there with another family, and they had a son my brother's age, and another boy my age. Timmy, who was my "pal," could never remember my name so he always called me "Somebody." One day he went racing back to the house to report that "Somebody had just kissed him."....the little tattletale.
Everyone has their favorite spot to crab, but my brother feels the Patuxent River has the sweetest crabs. "It's all about the bottom of the river," according to him, but there is a lot of good crabbing in the Chesapeake Bay, the Wye River, the Wicomico River, and any other little creeks and tributaries tucked along the land. As a child, I usually did my crabbing in the Patuxent River, so that is what I know the best. Unfortunately, I also remember the Patuxent Naval Air Station, where I could be out on the river in a canoe and hear a heliocopter go overhead with a blaring speaker saying "Get out of the water." You see, they tested jets there, and if you've ever read The Right Stuff, you know that sometimes the pilots didn't survive the trial. The Navy didn't want to be taking you out if the plane went down. Ah, childhood.
One way to crab is to bait your trot line every three to four feet with bait on a looped line and sinker. Some use a collapsible trap. My brother told me on Saturday that salted eel is the very best bait you can use in crabbing, but because of the popularity of eel in Asia, the market prices have been driven up, making it prohibitive to use. He swears by bull lips, because the meat is so tough, the crabs have a hard time chewing the bait away quickly. Some people use chicken necks with the same effect, but according to the "bro," bull lips is the way to go. Here's a link that will teach you how to make your own trot line:
http://www.marshbunny.com/mbunny/sidetrip/trotline/trotline.html
My brother has met a lot of crusty characters when he's been out and about with his boat, and he's gotten his best fishing tips from these Maryland watermen who make their livelihoods going out to farm a dwindling industry. I can remember as a child being taught that oysters were a natural resource of this region. No more. Red Smith, an old waterman my father and brother knew, taught my brother this very old-fashioned and traditional way to smoke oysters. Want to know how? Here's what you do:
You start with a five-gallon bucket of water which you heavily salt using sea salt, and taking burlap bags, you get them soaking, as you will need them later. You then spread out and build a large wood fire and get it going, then layer with any of the flavored woods: mesquite, cherry, or hickory. Once the fire is down to red hot coals, you place river stones over the surface. A river stone is a large flat, smooth, stone about an inch and a half in width. [Some people put a steel grate over this arrangement, but my brother thinks this transmits too much heat and can ruin the process.] Taking your burlap bags, which you have twisted and rung the water out of, you put down two layers over the rocks (and you can assume you will lose these in the cooking process through scorching), then you start layering with oysters, bags, oysters, bags, oysters until the bushel of oysters has been used up, then you cover the top layer with the wet bags. The steaming process takes a couple of hours, and the oysters are done when they pop open. The good thing about this very old way of smoking is that as the oysters begin to partially open they are retaining their liquid inside the shells, but they are also absorbing the smoke. And..according to my brother...things get very smoky. There is minimal shrinking in using this process, the oyster meat doesn't get tough and rubbery, and at the end, you have perfectly smoked oysters.
My brother has these wonderful crab knives made by the former Carval Hall Company in Crisfield, Maryland. They measure about six inches in overall length, and the blade runs about 2 1/2 inches long. They are weighted to give you the perfect "feel" in cracking crabs, and my brother has taught me this method in eating crabs, rather than the more commonly known method of pounding the crab with a wooden mallet. My brother told me the women who clean crabs in the processing plant in Crisfield use paring knives, but they hone the blade down to about the size of these crab knives, as it is ideal for digging in and getting out the crab meat. Instead of hitting the crab claw with a mallet, you flip the claw over, and you score the knife in just beyond the hinge point, rocking the knife in the score, and with a twist you can pop the shell off and you have a cocktail claw.
When the talk turned to cleaning fish, my father asked what is the hardest fish to fillet. "The flounder," my brother replied. Their bottom is white and the top is a mottled olive-brown. You fillet from the top, working near the spine and always cutting on a diagonal knife blade. "It's quite a process," my brother said.
My brother refuses to eat female crabs as "they make the babies," but for those of you who don't know, here is how you tell the difference between a female and a male crab.
The female has a shape like the U.S. Capitol
The male has a shape like the Washington Monument
The only other thing that would have made the day perfect would have been to have my mother with us, but we remembered her in our stories and had nothing but good memories.
