A good Baltimore crab night is messy and all about the people around the table

Now that summer's mostly here, it's time to talk hard crabs and the Baltimore mania of seafood at all costs.

I began to observe this phenomenon early in my childhood. Every Thursday afternoon the doorbell rang. It was a man known to me only as Mr. DiBlasi who delivered seafood from the Cross Street Market's Steve's Lunch, owned by Johnny Nichol. There’d be a couple of pounds of crab meat, not necessarily lump meat, resting in a brown paper bag. My family had a standing order.

By Friday morning my grandmother had it converted into a couple dozen crab cakes. She served these along with her other Friday inventory, fried fish and steamed shrimp.

Baltimoreans will not readily confess their passion for shrimp. As a non-seafood person, I observed the way my family and its guests devoured the shrimp first then tucked into the crab cakes. The lowly fried fish ran a distant third. Fried oysters in the cold weather months, and oyster stew, also beat out the fried fish.

An evening of at-home seafood involves a spirited cost/price/source analysis. Where did you get your ingredients? In conversation, price is always weighed. Expense is quickly and duly noted. It's a mark of honor that your seafood was dear and you went through hoops to buy it, catch it or prepare it. (Think about it. Who considers the price of cranberries or turkey?)

A Baltimore summer requires at least one hard crab picking adventure.

One scenario: Some family member slips out of the house to "get crabs" from some source. A bit of seafood mystery remains desirable and the crab's provenance is essential to the story.

Live crabs, presumably just caught, arrive in a wooden peach basket with the lid secured, but not so tight that one or two were prevented from escaping across the kitchen floor.

The crab steamer, a huge metal, tub-like vessel, appears from the cellar. In the no-air conditioner days of my youth, it was usually August and the kitchen felt like a commercial cannery the day workers made ketchup spiked with Old Bay. People liked it broiling for crab night.

An alarm went out that there would be no normal dinner that evening. We’d be having an at-home crab feast. A neighbor or two appeared so as not to miss anything. A good crab night is all about the people around the table.

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The kitchen table was spread with newspapers and traditional cutlery disappeared. In the place of forks were wooden crab mallets and maybe a knife. Some of the more enthusiastic crab pickers brought along their conventional nut picks, which doubled as crustacean surgical instruments.

A good crab feast must be slow and noisy. It makes a mess — a pile of discarded shells in the center of the table. My family took pride in their ability to annihilate a couple of dozen crabs over the course of an evening. Conversation decibels rose above the shell-pounding level.

As the curious observer, I watched those who never, ever touched alcohol make an exception that night. Everyone had a beer. Not an iced tea or water. It was National Bohemian or nothing.

There were no side dishes served. No potato salad or slaw. No cucumbers in vinegar. Don't even think about desserts. There was a widespread belief that crabs and ice cream ignited nightmares.

I also should mention some terminology. There was never a "hard-shell crab." It was a hard crab or a soft crab. It was understood that to be a crab, there was a shell. Sometimes the words soft crab were fused together as in, "soffcrab."

A pan sautéed soft crab was held in a different esteem from a night of hard crab picking. Each had its own culinary assessment. Soft crabs arrived early the season. Steamed hard crabs often arrived later, in August or September, when they bulk up.

Not in the mood for the at-home effort? Then venture to a local crab house, usually an obscure seafood restaurant, secluded down a back road skirting a creek in a part of Maryland visited but once a year. Maybe Cantler's Riverside Inn in Anne Arundel County or Schultz's on Old Eastern Avenue in Baltimore County. It's all part of the ordeal.