Summer’s bounty is officially here and it’s been helping me to satisfy those cravings I have all year long for fresh tomatoes, sweet cherries and tender greens like chard and butter lettuce. But because I spent 18 years of my life growing up in Maryland, summertime also makes me crave something I can’t find in the land-locked state of Colorado and that’s a good ol’ pile of Old Bay covered, steamed…Maryland Blue Crabs.
In Maryland, steamed crabs are the delicacy of summer. Anyone with good taste can appreciate a true Maryland crab cake (mostly lump crab meat, little to no filler…that’s a debate for a different day), but it takes a true Marylander or what I’d call an “adventurous outsider” to enjoy the sport of pickin’ crabs.
The setup is simple. You start with a newspaper-wrapped picnic table and simply dump the steamed crabs in the center of the table. Of course you need mallets, cold beer, a roll of paper towels, a bowl of lemon water, clean hands (that are prepared to be covered in Old Bay), and lots of time. It takes a good 15-20 minutes to pick just one crab, I think with a net result of about 1 oz of crab meat (yes upon this realization, this is when most “outsiders” bail). So yes, it seems kind of crazy to pay a heck of a lot of money, to get a pile of crabs that you then have to pick yourself, for a relatively small amount of meat and of course the added bonus of crab shell battle wounds on your fingertips. But I love every minute of it.
If you’re a true Marylander like me that has now ended up in some other part of the country and long for tender lump crab meat and Old Bay on your fingers and lips here are a few places that will ship Maryland Crabs - fully steamed - across the country.