Crab season

When I lived in France, there was only one culinary experience I was bold enough to come back from the U.S. and brag about -- Maryland crabs. From the time my friends in Baltimore first took me to Bo Brooks and I tasted the sweet white chunks of meat you pry out of these hardshell crabs, I have considered it one of the top eating experiences anywhere.

Going out for crabs became a regular feature of my visits stateside, as we switched back and forth from Bo Brooks to Obrycki's. When I moved back to the U.S., I'd visit regularly from Princeton, and since I've been living in DC it's a ritual to go at least once a season for a real crab feast.

Nowadays we go to Nick's Fish House and Grill, perched on the water south of the port with a lovely address on Insulator Drive. But sitting on the deck, you see only the water, the docked sailboats, the stately old Hanover Street bridge, and dozens of people whacking away with wooden mallets at the steamed crabs.

The visit last weekend was exceptional because jumbo crabs were available (though in earlier times these were probably known as extra large) and we were all hungry, so we added steamed shrimp, mussels in chipotle sauce, corn on the cob, French fries and pitchers of Fat Tire beer to the mix.

The bigger the crab, the bigger the chunks of meat and the easier they are to pick out of the various little crevices. It's a lot of work to eat crabs and the joy of having the big ones is that the payoff is bigger. Crabs come out of the steamer smothered in the Old Bay spice mix and are dumped directly on picnic tables covered with thick brown packing paper so that participants can grab a crab, crack the pincers with a wooden mallet to extract that meat, split open the body with a sturdy plastic knife, and squeeze, pull, pry and pick out what they can from the sharp, cartilaginous interior. The succulent meat needs no drawn butter, dressing, sauce or other adornment.

Nick's is reliably good, though this two dozen crabs did not come immediately out of the steamer and as a consequence were not as hot as they should have been. Our table was only feet away from the hard-working reggae band (we so wanted them to take more frequent and longer breaks), making conversation difficult. But cracking, picking and consuming crabs requires a lot of concentration, so conversation was often suspended anyway. Plus, we had the entertainment of several fellow diners pretending they were in Aruba and dancing to the music.

One could be forgiven for pretending to be in the Caribbean, given that it was a rare summer night that is warm without humidity, a breeze coming off the water, and that full, full moon coming up over the masts of the sailboats. Truly a feast.