Manna from Chesapeake Bay Heaven

Recently, while our fingers were buried in the bellies of two big fat blue Jimmies, my sister asked me “can you imagine what our lives would’ve been like if we hadn’t learned to pick crabs?” At first, I dismissed the question with a shrug. We’d miss some good eating, I thought, but it wouldn’t exactly have changed our lives.

But then I thought about it a little longer and realized that the blue crab represents a lot more to our family than the simple act of popping off the shell and scooping out that manna from Chesapeake Bay heaven. Being from the Eastern Shore, crabs are as much a part of the fabric of our lives as skiing is to a native of Aspen or eating crawfish is to a Cajun.

Growing up on the Eastern Shore, my sister and I practically cuts our teeth on crabs.
But the funny thing is that neither of us remembers actually being taught to pick crabs. As far as we know, when we were big enough to reach the table atop a couple of Sears catalogs and strong enough to spring the crabs loose from their shells, our fingers just started picking.

Conversely, it’s difficult to be good at picking crabs if you were not born to it. I’ve tried to teach numerous out-of-towners how to pop off the back, scrape off the deadman’s fingers, and use their fingers to dig out the meat. However, if it isn’t part of your breeding, the process is probably about as appetizing as gutting a fish and popping it in your mouth.

But the crab experience is hardly just about picking. When we were kids, a day that ended with crabs began dangling a chicken neck – attached to a piece of twine – into the water. This process required quite a bit of deception and patience for a bunch of little girls (my cousins included), whose best skills were giggling and talking nonstop. Once the crab began nibbling, it was our job to keep him from figuring out that his meal was about to turn him into ours…at least long enough for my dad to scoop him up in the net. Needless to say, our paltry catch generally had to be supplemented with my dad’s skill with a chicken neck or at the seafood market on the way home.

As we grew older and crabs grew scarcer, we began buying our live crabs in bushel baskets and our crab experience instead began around the steamer pot. Just like lobster, crabs must be dropped in the steamer while they’re still kicking and clawing. I can remember many a crab scuttling across the kitchen floor and my sister and me running for higher ground. And as the crabs meet their untimely death at the surface of the Budweiser and Old Bay boil, they let out a sound that has always resembled a cry of pain to me. Steaming crabs is not for the faint of heart.

Nowadays I live in inland Virginia so I only get to pick crabs about three times a season. But despite my lack of proximity to a pile of crabs, I will still choose a crab dish over a filet mignon any day of the week. And I haven’t lost my ability to size up a crab cake from 40 paces. So I guess I have to take that leap of logic and agree with my sister (just this once) that crabs indeed have “changed our lives.”