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Chesapeake Bay Blue Crab, Crab Cakes, Adding Machines and Sundry Other Topics of Merit
Chesapeake Blue Crab This is a tale of two crab cakes. They are separated by 40 years of cooking technology. Both are crafted with care and are top tier in their class, but they are different. What makes them different; improvements in cooking technological. In my home office I have a 1941 Remington Rand hand crank adding machine. It used to be on my grandmothers desk and it was a sophisticated machine for its day. When I was small I played with it. It fascinated me and I would try to trick it. It always won. It was able to add, subtract, multiply and with a little expertise, divide. It weighs 15.1 lbs At work I use an adding machine (computer) every day. My computer does things that only physicists and mathematicians could do in 1941. It calculates squares, square roots, cube roots, derivatives and even the most esoteric calculations man can imagine and it is done in parts of a second; faster than you could pull the handle on my 1941 machine. Technology is a powerful thing. Technology has also improved the way we cook, preserve, acquire, and serve food. 40 years ago a crab cake would be made with a couple of handfuls of picked crab, some bread crumbs, an egg, a mild white wine vinegar, a mild prepared mustard, a bit of Mayo, a squirt of Worcestershire sauce and some spices. You hand patted them into a patty and quickly baked them in butter in a hot oven or grilled them in butter. The technology of that day defines how you can prepare foods. The Crisfield Seafood Restaurant. They have been at this location since 1945, located in an aging part of Silver Springs, MD, a suburb of Washington DC. It is not an auspicious building but it is a traditional Chesapeake crab house. It has a beat up wood floor in the back, a shelf with hundreds of beer steins and a cupboard with a good collection or antique oyster plates. When I was young there were dozens of these places per mile. Most, including my favorite, The Chesapeake Seafood Kitchen have closed. Crisfield's front room has a long bar where they shuck oysters, pronounced "arsters". They certify that all crab is 100% Chesapeake blue crab. They cook and pick much of their crab on site so they know what they have in your crab cake. They know if they rely on backfin crabmeat or pick the crab down to the last flake in the last leg. They can tell you if they have predominantly "He crab" (Jimmies) or "She crabs" (Sooks). They say "She crabs" are sweeter, but I have never been able to tell one from the other. Crisfield's prepare the crab cake the traditional way. They use every particle of the crab they can pick from the backfin to the claw meat. It means that the consistency is going to have a little less texture than a lump crabmeat preparation. The breading is on the outside and it is browned on the griddle. The crab is the center of the dish and it is fresh, fresh, fresh. Crisfield's serves only seafood and a predominance of locally caught seafood. Their fried or broiled rockfish is very good; the oysters are fresh and nicely presented. I especially like the local scallops. As an aside, their French fries are old fashioned and great. Deep fried in some prohibited oil, served brown without being stiff and seasoned with salt. If you are interested in a traditional Chesapeake crab house this is a great place to try. You can look at the menu here: http://www.crisfieldseafoodrestaurant.com/menu.html. These are not the best crab cakes in the world, but they are quite good and tradition counts for something. Overall, it was a fun and tasty visit. Crisfield Seafood Restaurant
8012 Georgia Ave.,
Silver Spring, MD Let's go forward 40 to 50 years and see what is happening with crab in a modern restaurant. First, preservation, and preparation mechanisms are profoundly better. There are crab processing companies that prepare hundreds of lbs. of crab a day and can supply fresh prepared crab in a much larger geographic area than before. They process and prepare custom ordered crab. You can order only lump meat or claw meat or even only backfin, or you can get she crabs ready to make "She crab" soup, a local favorite. The restaurateurs have more room to experiment, to try things that may not have been possible until recently. As a result I have had chipotle crab cakes, crab cakes with lemon grass and pickled crab cakes, a thing I will never try again and I should have known because it was served in Wheeling, West Virginia. Even McDonalds experimented with a crab cake. They were small, thin, dry, bland and boring. I would eat two McDonalds crab cakes before I would eat the pickled crab cake again. Chefs have flexibility to differentiate their crab cakes from every other crab cake in the area. Today, the big trend is the lump meat crab, cakes that have chunks of crab. O'Donnell's Sea Grill prepares a good offering. O'Donnell's has been in business in various locations since 1922. Its present location is a new, spacious restaurant in the style of an architects’ imagined Chesapeake water home. It is in a large shopping center with easy parking. It has subdued lighting and dark wood paneling. Everything is comfortable and the service is crisply professional. The menu is almost entirely seafood with a couple of burgers, a chicken dish and a filet mignon thrown in for the kids and the weak of palette. It has a huge variety of entrees from crab stuffed eggplant to snapping turtle soup. Here is the menu: http://www.odonnellsrestaurants.com/site/menu/dinner_menu.html The crab cake is a generous amount of lump crab with just enough filling to keep it together. It is then put in an individual baking dish with unsalted butter and baked until it starts to become firm when it is taken out and finished under the broiler. This kind of crab cake has more texture and with a bit of lemon is a very good. The other entrees we tried were all good, especially the scallops and the deep fried shrimp. Again, nothing was the absolute best ever but all were top tier offerings. O'Donnell's Sea Grill | 311 Kentlands Boulevard Gaithersburg, MD 20878 I would go back to both of these restaurants. They are very different but both are steeped in the traditions of the Chesapeake Bay. Finally, if you have a crab cake without one piece of crab shell in it, you have been screwed. |
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