by Holly Hughes
I bring unrelenting perfectionism to the task. At L.P. Steamers I begin like I always do, by flipping the crab upside down to remove the limbs. The two rows of five legs twist off with the same effort it takes to unscrew the cap on a new tube of toothpaste. Sometimes tufts of pearly meat cling to their ends, prime for extracting with the teeth. I snap the crab’s front claws in half at the joint and go to work on them with a wooden mallet, the ubiquitous tool that accompanies this sort of feast. The goal is to retrieve the frilly flesh inside intact—to extract it unblemished and still attached to the pincers, usually achieved by tapping the shell a few times with the brisk force of a doctor administering a reflex test. I pause a second to admire the shapes and the colors before devouring my prize.
Now for the body. I slide a knife into the crab’s abdominal flap, called the “apron.” Most crabs served in restaurants are males, or “jimmies,” identified by the obelisk shape outlined on their aprons. I hold the knife steady and with my other hand lift off the hard, spiny shell to reveal the soft body within. There is no other sound on earth quite like that squishy crack. Once you tune in to its frequency, you’ll hear it repeated over and over at every table in the restaurant. I use the knife to scrape away the gray, tapered gills that line both sides of its form; kids often nickname them “dead man’s fingers.” There is a film of yellow green gunk—the hepatopancreas, a filtering organ—which Marylanders call the “mustard.” Some crab lovers find the stuff appetizing; I don’t, but neither am I hypersensitive about scraping every last bit away.
Then, with both hands, I break the body in two. How a person unearths the meat from the crab’s labyrinths of cartilage is entirely individual. I approach the task by squeezing each half together to crack and loosen the cartilage. Then I get surgical, cradling each section in my palm and, using my thumb, carefully peeling away the outside chamber and the leg sockets until there’s nothing left but a lush wad of alabaster meat. I use my fingers to dig out the remaining lacy threads of flesh.
Ryan eyes my handiwork from across the table and nods. I watch him break each half of his crab in two again, quartering the crustacean to more easily reach the choice clumps of meat. It’s an efficient method. He knows what he’s doing.
The steamed crabs are an unspoken test between us, a measure of our Maryland cred. Ryan, who hails from Ohio, has lived in Baltimore for 15 years. I am a prodigal son; I’ve been gone longer than Ryan’s been around. This sizing up isn’t a race or a competition. But noting how your tablemates eat steamed crabs—how efficiently and confidently they break them down, how cleanly they pick the shells for meat—is part of an innate Maryland dining code. Silently, without any acknowledgment, Ryan and I pass muster with one another. We plow through our dozen crabs. An ease, a trust, settles in between us. We sip from our bottles of National Bohemian beer, better known as Natty Boh, first brewed in Baltimore in 1885. Though it is is now made in North Carolina and Georgia, Natty Boh remains the city’s liquid mascot.
The Maryland–not Maryland dualism follows us as we head off in search of righteous crab cakes.
Lexington Market—Baltimore’s largest public market, established in 1782, more than a decade before the city was officially incorporated—sprawls across two buildings and houses more than a hundred vendors in a rippling sweep of humanity. Shoppers are predominantly black, but the crowd includes faces of many colors. We shuffle between stalls that sell fried chicken, deli sandwiches, fudge-covered cookies, shrimp fried rice, shiny vegetables in meticulous rows, and pizza by the slice or pie. Faidley Seafood, in business since 1886, stands apart from the throng, with its own wing and its own entrance. It began as a fishmonger, but expanded into food service half a century ago selling fish sandwiches; in 1970, a raw bar was installed, and a decade later the operation assumed its most famous role: Baltimore’s crab cake kingpins.
Nancy Faidley Devine, the granddaughter of founder John W. Faidley, stands behind a counter near the door. Her gloved hands are covered in a mix of mustard and mayo as she forms six-ounce globes of crabmeat and arranges them tidily on sheet pans. I watch her for a minute, and then ask my favorite question: “Are you using Maryland crab meat?”
She smiles, and answers by reaching for a small tub and handing it to me. It reads “Windmill Brand Crabmeat,” packed in Hoopers Island on Maryland’s Eastern Shore—a stretch of coast I know well. Most of my mother’s relatives live within 20 miles of that arc of the Chesapeake Bay. I smile back at her and order two crab cakes, one lump and one backfin.
Devine, who runs Faidley Seafood with her husband and daughter, arguably sparked the mania for “jumbo lump” crab cakes. In the 1980s, as a bid to differentiate her product from the competition, she devised a recipe showcasing the large, feather-shaped muscles, or “lumps,” that develop on the blue crab’s back swimming legs. There are only two lumps per crab, so it’s a costly extravagance. The idea had staying power, and by the 1990s “jumbo lump” became the gold-standard shorthand, not only in Maryland but nationwide in steakhouses and other restaurants peddling luxury.
Before Devine’s jumbo lump revelation, the premium part of the crab was backfin meat, which comprises broken pieces of lump as well as stringier threads. This is the meat that made up the crab cake I grew up on, and as long as a backfin crab cake isn’t padded out with too much breading (Marylanders are obsessed with crab cakes having as little “filler” as possible), it is a homely but eloquent expression of silky richness.
Ryan and I bulldoze through both of the crab cakes that Faidley’s cooks broil for us. Preference between them, we resolve, is a matter of prioritizing texture versus taste. Undoubtedly, the lump-studded sphere shines in it golden beauty, each forkful weighty with plump morsels of flesh. The darker, squatter backfin cake isn’t a looker, but I find its flavor more intense, more direct; it’s the one that quiets my yearnings for home. It’s the crab cake I’d return for, that brings me back to myself.
Every time I’ve stopped in Maryland, bought a crab cake, and posted a picture of it online, someone invariably comments with, “Go try the ones at Koco’s Pub!” A neighborhood haunt in a residential stretch six miles from downtown Baltimore, Koco’s canary-yellow exterior gives way to a long dining room swathed in sky blue, lime green, and a bright orange that brings to mind the Orioles logo. Customers fill every table, and no one seems to order anything but crab cakes.
Koco’s specialty is a Frankenstein’s monster of crab weighing in at eleven ounces—twice the mass of a regulation major league baseball. It’s all lump, little filler, creamy, and with a spunky hit of Old Bay, the state’s beloved crab seasoning. (Plenty of crab houses and seafood restaurants alternately use custom spice blends—perhaps oomphing sweet spices like mace, rearing back on the celery salt, or ratcheting up the paprika—often sourced from Old Bay’s local competitor J.O. Spice Co.) The charm of this behemoth is obvious.
Is the crabmeat from Maryland? “It isn’t,” says a manager. “Sometimes it’s from Maryland, but it’s often from Indonesia and other places. We just do so much volume, we need a steady supply.” Koco’s is hardly alone in its approach, and I appreciate the staffer being straightforward. That isn’t always the case in restaurants. A study published last year by the seafood watch group Oceana detailed some troubling results: The organization surveyed nearly 90 regional restaurants advertising Maryland crabmeat, and found that 46 percent of the places located in Baltimore were actually selling specimens from other parts of the world (most frequently Asia and Mexico). The researchers determined that this might not necessarily be the restaurants’ fault: Mislabeling can easily happen in the distribution channel before the product enters the United States, and restaurants may believe they’re buying locally when they’re not.
(As one reaction to this type of fraud, two-dozen or so Baltimore restaurants—including Mid-Atlantic sensation Woodberry Kitchen, a perennial on Eater’s list of America’s essential restaurants—participate in the state’s “True Blue” certification program, whi
ch verifies that a restaurant serves only authentic Maryland crab.)
From a dining perspective, here’s what I’m learning on this trip: Many customers may not care all that much about the origins of the crabs they’re enjoying. Ryan and I walk into several packed crab houses during our days together—places that get raves in local publications, institutions recommended to Ryan by Baltimorean food lovers—and when we ask where the steamed crabs come from, the servers nonchalantly say “Louisiana” or “Texas.” They tilt their heads, confused or amused, when we say thanks and wave goodbye without ordering.
I get that consistent supply is the bottom line for a business. We all have our own principles. Truthfully? At Christmastime, when I visit my family, I would gratefully wolf down Koco’s enormous, deftly seasoned crab beast. But in the warm weather, in a year when the harvest is abundant, my native Maryland heart tells me not to eat blue crab from any other waters but the Chesapeake Bay.
Part of the ease with which Baltimoreans accept blue crabs from other shores, I think, is that a loyalty to their crab house is stronger than a loyalty to local foods. Everyone has the nearby haven that their family has patronized for years, where the steamed crabs have just the right amount of caked-on spices, where the seasoning isn’t too hot or too sweet for their palate. And I can empathize, now that I have a new go-to crab house myself, though it’s 20 miles from my parents’ house. Schultz’s Crab House is in Essex, a blue-collar community on the edge of Baltimore surrounded by the Back and Middle rivers.
When I look around the dining room at Schultz’s for the first time, on my last day in Baltimore, it’s as if someone tapped my childhood restaurant memories and reified them into this set piece: knotty wood paneling, a figurine of a fisherman in a yellow slicker, a mounted fiberglass marlin, faded pictures of boats and docks, white butcher paper on every table.
And yes, the crabs are from Maryland. Ryan and I ask for jumbos, six inches or more in length, typically the largest size available in restaurants, and the server tells us the kitchen steams them to order—at that size, it’ll be 45 minutes. Fine. We fill the wait with speedier dishes: jumbo lump and backfin crab cakes (here, too, I find I’m partial to the lacey backfin version), thick cream of crab soup, and a crackly mound of crab fluff. I nearly burst into tears when the crab imperial—essentially a casserole of crab, mayonnaise, and spices—shows up in a foil crabshell, the way it did in restaurants when I was a kid obsessed with the dish. On the side are pickled beets, a cucumber salad, and a sight I haven’t seen in probably 30 years: a bloodily crimson spiced apple ring, set atop a leaf of kale as garnish. It’s alarming how far back in time I can travel at Schultz’s.
The steamed crabs, when they arrive, are dense and full of such delicate, heavenly meat, and I swear I can taste cardamom zigzagging through the mud slick of spices. We chuck the shells into a blue bucket, but leave the papered tabletop littered with a carnage of claws and cartilage and murky stains. The server is cleaning up the crime scene, gathering the butcher paper at its edges, even before we reach the door.
Lunch at Schultz’s is my final meal of the trip. Ryan and I hug goodbye (“It’s like you were my best buddy at Crab Camp!”) and I’m already thinking about the next flights, the next cities, the next meals. It’s doubtful I’ll have Maryland crab in Baltimore again this year.
It’s doubtful I’ll have much crab meat at all, frankly. I know it’s silly, but eating my native delicacy in other places leaves me empty. In San Francisco, a bowl of taglierini twined with Dungeness crab (more gossamer in texture than its compact Chesapeake cousin) can certainly be a pleasure. In my travels, though, I find myself detouring around crab shacks on the coast of Georgia or Lake Pontchartrain, and in chophouses I’ll always choose oysters or shrimp cocktail over a jumbo lump orb. Other people can rightly adore these things. To me they’re only echoes of home, like the mirrored outline of downtown Baltimore rippling and blurring in the waves of the Inner Harbor.
The Burning Desire for Hot Chicken
BY DANNY CHAU
From TheRinger.com
As associate editor of The Ringer, Danny Chau usually covers pro sports, which may explain his no-pain-no-gain approach to eating Nashville’s famous local specialty, hot chicken. Traveling from his native L.A., he was a man on a mission—to put his rigorously honed spice tolerance to the ultimate test.
Years ago, when he was still the mayor of Nashville, Bill Purcell received a call from England. The son of Prince Charles’s girlfriend wanted to meet him. I don’t know if that’s something I need to do, he thought to himself. The voice on the other line clarified the purpose of the meeting: He wanted to eat hot chicken. “Well, then I’m in,” Purcell blurted out.
Purcell is a man who, while serving as majority leader in the Tennessee House of Representatives, declared Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack to be the best restaurant in Tennessee. In 2005, the mayor and his royalty-adjacent guest met at Prince’s and sat down to chat. Purcell’s guest immediately said, “I will have the extra hot.”
“Oh, don’t do that,” Purcell said. “You should have the hot chicken.” He pointed to the window art that greets visitors on their way in. “See? Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack. That’s what they serve.”
The men walked up to the counter to place their order through a little square opening in the wall that conceals the kitchen from civilians. The exchange feels like a negotiation at a box office.
“One quarter chicken, brown and white, extra hot,” the guest said.
Prince’s owner Andre Prince Jeffries attempted to talk him off the ledge, but extra hot is what he got. Purcell walked back to the table with a smile. He knew what was coming.
The Brit was Tom Parker Bowles, the son of Camilla, (now) duchess of Cornwall. Parker Bowles, a prominent food writer, was on a research trip for his book, The Year of Eating Dangerously: A Global Adventure in Search of Culinary Extremes. He got what he wanted, and he loved his first bite. Then it started to hurt. Then came the tears. Bowles would dedicate two pages in his book to describing the misery the Prince’s extra-hot chicken put him through. “The only thing willing me on is pure, pig-headed pride,” Bowles wrote. “Each mouthful becomes more and more painful and numbing until I’m uncertain as to whether I’m swallowing my saliva or just dribbling it out of my mouth.”
“He thought he was going to die,” Purcell told me.
Hot chicken was a dish created for the express purpose of bringing a man to his knees. Its origin myth wasn’t the result of a mistake, like chocolate chip cookies, Coca-Cola, or the French dip sandwich. Hot chicken was premeditated; to this day, every bite of Nashville hot chicken is touched by the spectral presence of a betrayed lover.
The story remains such a foundational part of hot chicken’s allure that it bears repeating (and, frankly, it never gets old): Back in the 1930s, there was a man named Thornton Prince, who had a reputation around town as a serial philanderer. His girlfriend at the time, sick of his shit and spending her nights alone, decided to do something about it. After a long night out, Prince came home to breakfast. His girlfriend made fried chicken, his favorite. But before serving it, she caked on the most volatile spices she had in the pantry—presumably cayenne pepper and mustard seed, among other things. If it didn’t kill him, at least he would reevaluate his life choices. He didn’t do either—Prince fell harder for the over-spiced piece of chicken than he did for any woman he’d ever courted. Prince implored her to make it for his family and friends—they all loved it, too.
An act of revenge became a neighborhood treasure, and Nashville’s one true indigenous food. The identity of Prince’s girlfriend (the real innovator here) has been lost to time, but the fearful flashes of mortality that hot chicken eaters have experienced for more than 80 years gives a particular angel in heaven her wings.
Technically, hot chicken is straightforward. The flavor profile has likely evolved since Thornton Prince took his first bite, and every restaurant claims to have a secret preparation. But in esse
nce, it is fried chicken coated in a paste largely consisting of cayenne and other dried spices with a splash of hot oil from the fryer. Because the paste is oil-based and searingly hot, the skin stays crisp, unlike buffalo wings, which are prone to either drying out or getting gloppy in a hurry. (Hot chicken predates the first buffalo wing by three decades.) The finished product has a lurid, reddish hue that, depending on the spice level, ranges from California sunset to the bowels of hell. Hot chicken is served with two mandatory accompaniments: a slice of plain old white bread upon which the bird is perched and a few pickle chips skewered to the chicken with a toothpick.
That’s it. It is, in my opinion, a damn-near perfect dish. The lines that separate love and hate, pleasure and pain, expectation and reality—they dissolve when you eat hot chicken. If you do it right, it will hurt. You might cry. And you will spend the next week thinking about when you might have it again.
Hot chicken has become one of the biggest national food trends of the last few years, but I didn’t come to Nashville to Columbus a dish that has existed for nearly a century. I did come to see, from the source, why America’s fascination with hot chicken is exploding at this particular moment. As recently as 10 years ago, hot chicken wasn’t a universally acknowledged dish, even in its birthplace. For the majority of its existence, it was largely contained within the predominantly black East Nashville neighborhoods that created it, kept out of view under the shroud of lawful segregation.
Prince’s old location was close to the Ryman Auditorium, where the Grand Ole Opry performed for more than three decades. Its late-night hours were perfect for performers, and early adopters like Country Music Hall of Famer George Morgan helped build a devout following. But in the segregation era, to get their fix, they had to walk through a side door. Prince’s was operated like a white establishment in reverse: blacks order in front, whites out back.