A testing feast

Crab feasts! Honestly, I'm from Maryland, what else could I write about? What other food is so heavily meme'd, so heavily joked and written about? What other food inspires Facebook groups that both idolize and mock it? I belong to one called "Maryland is a cult. Not a State." The group is basically 2/3rd either the flag or crabs. Crabs spawned lines of spin-off foods that are basically just normal food with the seasoning we use for crabs thrown on. Old Bay is a mélange of spices that is an iconic part of Maryland and crab feasts. I insist it's peppery, my fiancé insists it's salt, anyway there are a lot of different spices that add up to a delicious blend. There are restaurants that are based entirely around this one food item.

Theoretically, you can get crabs any time of year. The wonders of modern refrigeration & transportation, I suppose. But a true crab feast is a summer activity. You save up newspaper for it all year (heck, my parents and brother still get newspaper delivered almost for the sole purpose of having it for a crab feast during the summer). Then, the time comes, you lay the newspaper out over the table in multiple layers and bring out the mallets or knives with thick hafts. There are other things on the table: corn-on-the-cob, potato salad, coleslaw & the like. If you have an out-of-towner visiting, maybe you grill up a few hot dogs to be nice. But if its all locals, no way. I'll eat the corn, but the rest is left untouched. But most of the room at the table and in your stomach is saved for that glorious pile of chitin & spice at the center of the table. It comes in a giant paper bag that is upended over the center of the table. The picture attached to this story does not do justice to the sheer, glorious mess of it all - a tangled pile of crabs, crab claws & legs, along with juices that leak out from when they were steamed. The smell induces pure ecstasy!

Crab season is in the summer probably because of something to do with their life cycle. But crab feast season is definitely summer because a crab feast is not just a meal. It's a marathon session of eating, talking, relaxing and hammering away at a meal that helps you burn the calories you get from it. It will go on for hours, and no one gets up from the table. Water glasses (or better, lemonade glasses and for some, beer cans) are covered by matted Old Bay seasoning. There's no point in wiping off your hands because they'll just get it on them again when you pick up the next crab. It also helps to season the meat as you're eating it. Of course, it burns a little too. The crabs fight back with those little spikes on their shells; when they cut your skin, the salt gets in. Maybe all Marylanders have a taste of the masochistic in us. It's also a reflex training exercise to avoid the shells and juices flying from your friends and family as they're merrily whacking away. The shell fragments have gotten in my hair and all over my clothes, but it's a good thing most of my family already wears glasses! It's also an exercise in diligence. Eating a filling meal from a crab feast probably requires 4-6 crabs, which is not a short task. Crab meat is also very flaky, and little strands and chunks of it wind up scattered around your place at the table for you to discover as you rest between crabs. It isn't right to do this in the stifling confines of a temperature controlled dining room. No, a true crab feast needs the outdoors: patios, porches & backyards. Sun & the fresh humid air makes the crabs saltier and the lemonade sweeter.

Crab feasts are iconic because they are also a rite of passage. No one in my family would dare say they were dating someone worthy of marrying into the family until they'd made it through at least one. Every single one of the boys my little sister has dated had has to face the Old Bay gauntlet. Most have passed, but one failed spectacularly! In fact, his failure is the whole reason the test exists for my family. Let's call him Todd. Todd was a quintessential pretty-boy. His lips were a little too big for him, but other than that, he was model material (and from my understanding, did, in fact, do some modeling). He'd been dating my sister for a few months during college when summer came around. The family had met him before and he seemed nice enough but then came the crabs. He refused to touch them, made my sister break them open for him! My family would never openly tell my sister that he was unworthy. But we definitely made it clear he had failed an important test, and that relationship did not survive the summer. We hadn't even known it was a test (she was the first one to date someone from out of state), but that enshrined it for us. My big sister's husband has since had to suffer through it (he passed, but I think it's only because he knew it was a test).

When I was first dating the woman who is now my fiancé, I told her about crabs and crab feasts. She's from Florida, far distant from crabmania. I didn't expect her to be squeamish about it, but she surpassed my expectations: she trained for it! She went to a local farmers market a week before I was going to take her over the crab feast and got a bushel (which is quite a few, more than a single person would normally eat) to practice how to eat it. Crabs are not an easy food to eat. You have to crack open the shells to get at the food inside. You also have to peel open the body of the crab itself and then navigate a maze of cartilage to get to the meat, avoiding the inedible innards. My fiancé says that she was lucky that some friends saw her wrestling with it, because one of them came over and plucked the lungs out of her hands because she didn't know she wasn't supposed to eat them. She would have figured it out, as they are rubbery and taste disgusting. They're deceptive though, because they look just enough like the meat that if you aren't paying close attention, you might pick one up off the table by accident. With the preparation well in hand, she managed to impress all of us (although she did confess the preparation a few crabs in). Needless to say, she passed the test.

I'm sure that there are many good foods and plentiful stories about them and the summer joys that they bring. But for sheer cultural predominance, even if it's in a small corner of the country, I don't see how anything can beat a crab feast.