My fingers still smell like Old Bay Spice -- and with good reason. My friends and I just ate at Bo Brooks's floating restaurant dock, and we had 3 steamed crabs apiece. The way Maryland crabs are cooked, are like no other. I had a caesar salad for starters, but that was just a formality. The real reason for being in Baltimore, was to have eastern shore steamed crabs. The way it's done here, if you've never experiences this, is to have a pile of crabs, covered in Old Bay Spice dumped onto brown paper on your table. Mallets are provided, some paper, and you start cracking, peeling and eating.
My lips started to sting as the spices hit my mouth. And after three crabs, I felt a momentary stab of disappointment as I realized there weren't anymore. Or was that indigestion? No..because there was still room for dessert at Vaccaro's, another Baltimore institution.
Eating crabs like this brings back good memories of how when I was little, I used to visit my PoPo in Hong Kong. For dinner, she would steam/boil medium sized shrimp, dump them on a folding table, and we'd get to work peeling, dipping into a sauce bowl (soy sauce and red peppers), and eat. PoPo would keep cooking other dishes, but eventually, she'd come out and eat the shrimp, particularly sucking on the shrimp heads.
I remember coming to Baltimore several years ago with my coworkers for an offsite, and the big dinner, at the aquarium, no less, was to have piles of steaming crabs. Some people were really turned off by that -- something about not liking their dinner to have a face? I just thought, well, that's a shame, but then, there's more crab for me :)
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