Why is Tess Monaghan allergic to shellfish? I thought that would be funny, this quintessential Baltimore girl, incapable of eating the region’s signature dish of steamed crabs.
Then someone very dear to me developed a shellfish allergy and I realized it’s not that funny. But, by then, I was seven books into the series and I couldn’t change Tess’s fate.
And the fact is, I’m not particularly passionate about this local delicacy. Too much mess for me — the Old Bay under the fingernails, the newspapers and shells, which send up a mighty stink within 24 hours. When I was a child, my family would end crab feasts by driving what felt like hours (probably 30 minutes) to the incinerator, where we would hand the crab remains to a begrimed worker who thrust them into a roaring fire right behind him. At least, that’s the image my memory presents, a drive-through incinerator. I’m sure family members would dispute it.
But no one would dispute this: My parents had a set of really nice crab mallets, made of dark wood, with stainless steel handles. These were considered extraordinary objects. So I must have been very, very, very angry when I took one and, with a precision that outstripped Ed Ames’s famous appearance on the Tonight Show, aimed it at the back of my sister’s head from a distance of several feet, while we were both running down Wetheredsville Road.
Memories of local culinary treats and your own relationship to them, please. Or memories of mayhem committed with cherished utensils.
Growing up in rural Illinois, picking corn straight from the garden, shucking it, and throwing it in boiling water then eating it. All within 30 minutes. Can’t beat it with a stick (or a fancy crab mallet, in Laura’s case).
The part I love about eating crabs is the mess and method! I agree it does major damage to my fingernails but that goes away pretty fast — what? 3 days? My delight comes from my family who required dinner to be with linens, silver, candles, and never an elbow on the table. Ah, eating crabs is the best revenge!
My interest was peaked by not knowing the reference to <i>The Tonight Show</i>. I love
Google: Click my web link above to see it.
Here in upstate NY, the local favorite is probably the Buffalo-style chicken wing (properly served with blue cheese dressing). Equal to any food in the messiness department, IMHO.
My strongest memory of childhood mayhem is probably the time I shot my brother in the back with a cork gun. I’m not sure why I did it, but it must’ve seemed like a good idea at the time. At least until my mom got hold of me.
I don’t do the shell-fish thing, but many summers ago, on the eastern shore of Maryland (where you could smell the ocean), I had a lunch of bisque and crab cake which was about the best lunch I’ve ever had (with my clothes on).
Gotta agree with Peg that fresh-picked sweet corn is very, very hard to beat – but in Indiana!
As for mayhem with utensils – just a few weeks ago I had pulled the plastic bag off the Sunday newspaper, and was busily popping and re-popping it. My lovely wife HATES it when I do that, but what can I say? Its somewhere between “habit” and “compulsion” – and anyway, by now she should be used to it, right?
Well, she had been brushing our youngest daughter’s hair, and after hollering “STOP THAT” at me (which, or course, I ignored!), she came around the corner and chucked a plastic spray bottle of detangler at me – striking me right in the face!
I turned away and felt to make sure I wasn’t bleeding (and that my eye was still there) and – being an old married guy – INSTANTLY realized that….she owed me!! Indeed, she owed me big time!!
Fairly quickly it also occurred to me that a marital capital windfall of that sort (based on guilt) is quite perishable – it has to be cashed in and expended quickly, if at all.
And this, I did!
In my only visit to the city, I did not have crabs.
I did grab a bag of Utz on my way back to the airport, though.
Laura – my mother had one of those same crab mallets. After she died it became fair game for the rest of us, so of course it was eventually lost.
As a child, being allowed to finally pick my own crabs and sit with the adults was memorable. So too were the impromptu crab feasts in high school and college, when I’d get together with a couple of buddies, pool whatever cash we had on hand, and pick up a dozen or two at Ross’ Crab House, or Neptunes on Holabird Avenue.
“Neptune’s on Holabird Avenue”
Oh, I haven’t thought of them in years but that’s where we always got crabs when I was a kid. Talk about memories!
Mom had a set of Melmac dishes–the defensive necessity for a mother of five. These were sturdy dishes, grey and teal, and capable of surviving a direct nuclear strike. Service for twelve–plates, salad plates, cups, saucers, monkey dishes. When we had all moved on and Mom retired the set, only one piece had ever been broken–a cup my sister, Nancy, cracked by throwing it at me one night when we were on dish duty together and I was being perfectly beastly. To this day she shows no remorse–smart girl–because I deserved it.
Ab,
I cannot imagine you being “perfectly beastly.”
Bertha’s is still in Baltimore.
And I am stuck on Brian’s remark about the best meal he ever had with his clothes on. While I can see that naked meals are probably associated with all sorts of great memories, they’re not necessarily culinary ones for me. I have usually been dressed, often very well dressed, for the best meals of my life (the Bristol in Paris, Bibendium* in London, a round of appetizers eaten just last week at 11 Madison in New York, my mother-in-law’s latkes, any place John Connolly ever took me in Dublin, every burger consumed so far at the Abbey Burger Bistro. Naked meals need the novelty of nudity to be memorable and try saying that five times fast.
The asterisk above reminds me of one important condition in meals remembered as great — hunger/desperation. My SO and I stumbled into Bibendium during the holiday season in London when it was impossible to get a meal without booking. We had been walking for quite some time through Knightsbridge and I think we would have been grateful for a crust of bread. I swear that the meal was an exceptional one on its own. However, I know the meal I ate when I was 13, at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, was unabashedly ordinary, but after an entire day on a mule, I would have been delighted by anything they served me.
A recent article in SAVEUR magazine about Thomas Keller, the chef famed for the FRENCH LAUNDRY in Napa valley, CA, stated that he got his start “boiling crabs at the BAY AND SURF restaurant” on RT 1 in Laurel, MD.
The BAY AND SURF would be considered a Blue Hair mediocre restaurant today, but in the 60′s and 70′s, along with joints like O’Donnells(“the tang o the sea”)in Bethesda and THE GOLDEN BULL in Adelphi and Gaithersburg, it was considered high end dining, and a special place to go.
But, I can guarantee that Thomas Keller was steaming, NOT boiling crabs. Boiling crabs happens along the SE Atlantic coast and the Gulf, but never, no never is this method employed in MD and very rarely in VA.
The belief is so strong in The Old Line State that steaming is the only way to cook these swimming decapods, I’m surprised that Governor Don Schaeffer (sp?) never legislated crab boiling into illegal status during his time in Annapolis.
I haven’t had crabs this year, even though I have been in the Mid Atlantic 10 times since March. As a business traveler who travels and eats alone on the road, I am constantly reading. There is nothing worse for me than sitting alone at a restaurant’s table with nothing to read. That is how I came to read Tess’s adventures and Laura’s truly gifted writing. And, as anyone who has eaten MD Crabs knows, it is nearly impossible to work out the crab meat and read at the same time.
Bella1 – the best place for Mussels in the DC and Baltimore are is LE MANNEQUIN PIS in Olney and Bob Weidemaiers BECK in DC, which are the best and only Belgium Bistros in the area.
Born in Maryland, grew up on the Gulf Coast of Florida, and I can’t do shellfish. Always the crab feasts with acres of newspapers, mounds of shells, the special mallets. I just can’t do it.
Out here on the southern edge of Indiana, I’m happy to say that a local restaurant does a killer filet mignon with raspberry wine sauce, bleu cheese stuffed roasted onions and garlic mashed potatoes that is heavenly. But my favorite restaurant in the region–and place where I’ve had some of the best meals of my life–is Proof on Main down in Louisville. It might as well be a New York City restaurant, makes me nostalgic for Manhattan. Their site is http://www.proofonmain.com, well worth checking out. Their Kentucky Burger is out of this world–served with “jezebel sauce,” which I’d never heard of before and can’t live without now…
Jim, you are a man of great taste – Utz potato chips!!!
I am from Florida and never learned how to swim. The only seafood I liked growing up was fried shrimp and fish that had been filleted (sp?) by my mother. I was the only one in my family who didn’t eat crabs, lobster, or beets. Or watermelon. Still don’t.
Delmarva Dreaming – Remembering a lovely mussels/pasta dinner at a restaurant in DC, my boyfriend and I decided to recreate it on a weekend trip to Chincoteague. We brought Montgomery county homegrown tomatoes and basil for sauce, fresh linguine and a few other ingredients. He thought that the mussels would be fresher if we got them ourselves. We put on tennis shoes and went to a spot he knew and gathered buckets of beautiful mussels. We did it when the tide was in to make cleaning them easier. It was a lovely night for outside dining. The meal was spectacular, delicate and luscious.
That reminds me of another unique mussels experience. After college, I worked 2 jobs for months and took off for Europe for 4 months with no itinerary, but lots of places and ex-pats to visit. Europe was great but in Spain, I realized these countries were so tame that I could easily handle touring in western countries as an old woman. I made some new friends and we decided to go to Morocco. 10 of us hopped in a VW bus and drove there. Being a third world country i was much more demanding and certainly exotic. The group split up and I ended up with two sister from Minnesota. After several weeks, 5 cities, and the Marrakesh express, they were desperata to have to have peanut butter. (They had been traveling much longer and needed a taste of America.)
They insisted we leave the cities and head for an Army base because the PX would have this desired food. So we took a little detour. The American service men in this Muslim country welcomed us with open arms. We easily gained access to the PX. This base was on the ocean and the guys decided we should have a special mussels feast. Coolers full of beer, a bonfire, baseball talk and barbecued mussels. It was divine. If you didn’t know better, you would have thought we were in the US. The guys were so thrilled to be able to speak English with women who didn’t wear burkas. I had a great time but I was too young to comprehend how amazing the experience was. 100 perfect gentlemen entertaining 3 young women with fresh fish – that’s never happened again.
Eery time I spied an “Eat Bertha’s mussles” bumper sticker, I would think of these 2 meals. Is Bertha’s still in Baltimore?
Laura, I remember the drive thru incinerator also….was it on Pulaski Hwy?
I never knew for sure. It was definitely an epic journey from the west/northwest side.
When I was young, we had a place on the bay near Cape St. Claire. A couple of times a week during the summer, my brother and I would get up early (when you could just barely see), pull on shorts and tee shirts, and slip out through the garage, picking up buckets and crab nets as we went. Down to the beach and out onto the pier to look for crabs hiding on the seaweed-encrusted pilings. We’d wander down the beach and out onto all the piers or wade out to abandoned pilings until we had enough crabs for everyone for lunch.
All this was in total silence from the first shaking the other awake till we got back to the morning kitchen. Both of us were pretty quiet by nature and didn’t want to wake our younger siblings, but mostly we treasured the stillness of those early hours, just the soft slap of the waves and the creak of the wood.
My favorite “small” local culinary treat is C Howard’s Violet candies. They are hard to find outside of New York and they taste like you are eating perfume, but I love them. I don’t know why I love them and I don’t know what made me try them in the first place or when. They are an absolutely acquired taste. But they taste like they smell, and they smell just wonderful.
–Marjorie
My brother-in-law feels the same way, but it’s a risk I choose to take. As noted somewhere on this blog, people are remarkably bad at risk assessment, so I could be doing the stupidest thing ever or I could be making a reasonable choice. But, to be clear, I’m not making a reasoned choice, just a choice.
My hunch is that driving over the speed limit is probably a bigger statistical risk than steamed shellfish, but — well, I have been known to drive over the speed limit.
A very close relative of mine about 30 years ago got hepatitis from eating steamed mussels at a ritzy restaurant on the Connecticut shore. (No aspersions cast on Connecticut.)
Her doctor said steamed shellfish is absolutely taboo, that steaming does not create enough heat to kill the bacteria.
Hate to be a drag on this subject because I know steamed crabs are delicious, not to mention other steamed shellfish.
But that doctor was adament and many other medical professionals and writers have warned of the dangers of steamed seafood.
So I have stayed away from this delicacy since then.
But seafood sauteed or baked or grilled is delicious.
A risky food thing I do, and the rationalization:
I drink way too much icy cold Diet Coke (36 to 48 ounces a day) ; gotta be bad for my bones and entrails, yes? But – I have good white teeth. My dentist attributes that to (here’s the fig leaf!) – almost always drinking with a straw! (the acids and caramel coloring therefore bypasses them, and head right down the pipe!)
Oh, and Chinese Buffets*. If you read the Board of Health restaurant reviews in the paper, these places always seem to do poorly; something to do with the wide array of foods, and their different handling requirements.
But I love Chinese buffets nonetheless.
The trick is – only scoop up food that has just been dumped into the trough, while it’s piping hot.
*And of course, when you get your fortune cookie you have to do the joke of adding the words “in bed” onto the end of whatever your fortune says
All right, I’m telling a story I rarely tell about fortune cookies, which is a family legend.
When my mother was 8 1/2 months pregnant with me (and enormous), she and my dad ate in New York’s Chinatown. She opened a fortune cookie which had the message, “Beware of fornication.” (I swear this is true.)
She looked up and saw the restaurant’s staff giggling in the doorway of the kitchen.
It made her laugh years later.