Drooling just thinking about them

The New York Times has an article by Jordan Hruska about the crab houses of the Eastern Shore:

You're going to want the jumbos, hon,” my waitress said as she stood, pen poised over her pad, next to my unadorned pine picnic table on the crowded outdoor deck of Waterman’s crab house. understood the advice. There’s nothing more disheartening than picking up a steamed blue crab that looks undersize and limp, without the ballast of plenty of meat under the shell— and knowing that the minutes about to be spent cracking and picking through it will be less than amply rewarded.
But I was surprised that there were any jumbo-size crabs left at Waterman’s that evening— a warm June Friday with the kind of sunburned, jolly crowd I remembered from many a childhood pilgrimage to the crab houses of the Eastern Shore of Maryland. A swarm of hungry feasters clustered around the tables jammed on the deck, arrivals from land and sea intent on attacking their personal shares of the seasonal bounty.
Guttural charges from powerboats headed in our direction suggested that more of the hungry were en route from the Chesapeake Bay, where the calm, wobbling eddies were flashing with the day’s last rays of sun just beyond where I sat. Several larger groups of diners grabbed bottles of cheap beer from aluminum buckets and fried seafood from red plastic baskets. Nearby, in what looked like a modified gazebo, a rock band began its sound check.
I felt an elbow in my ribs, and my table neighbor offered a quick apology. Like most of the others, he was hunched over the brown paper tablecloth with arms out at both sides, manipulating the tools that replace traditional cutlery at a crab house: a wooden mallet in one hand, a paring knife in the other. His hands, like theirs, were slimy to the wrist with crab innards and spicy sludge, and like many of them, he sported an unabashedly sloppy grin. All pretense is shed at a crab house spread.
When I was growing up in Annapolis, my parents and I frequently piled into the car on weekends in spring and summer, season of the steamed blue crab, and took off over the 4.3-mile Chesapeake Bay Bridge to the Eastern Shore. Or sometime we came by sea, hitching rides with friends who had boats and discovering crab houses in back creeks and coves that could be tricky to find on land.
Power boats helmed by shirtless, potbellied classic rock fans and humble sailing vessels carrying Topsider-and-Polo-outfitted Jimmy Buffett types shared the mooring spaces at these spots, and after we docked, I would run past all their crews to the shallow tubs where the young live crabs were kept before their turns in the steamer. Inhaling the pungent smell, I would tease, rather than taste, in my first encounter with the crabs — rewarded by pinches from their nervous claws.
Our time in the car seemed much less exciting, but now I look back fondly on the family drives past the shore’s Colonial estates, with my mother’s eyes peeled for antiques stores and my father pushing the speed limit on the barren roads. Our tradition wasn’t much different from that of others local to the tidewater regions of Maryland, Virginia and Delaware. The shellfish catches on the Eastern Shore feed the tourist-clogged locales of Baltimore and Annapolis, but relatively few travelers venture to the source: a gracious stretch of land that is one of the greatest undeveloped areas on the mid-Atlantic coast.
The Chesapeake Bay, or simply the Bay, as it’s known to Marylanders, is the nation’s largest estuary, a vast, rich incubator for sea life born from the brackish combination of fresh and saltwater. The saltwater comes in steadily from the Atlantic while the freshwater runs down from a watershed that stretches as far north as central New York.
Maryland’s state-regulated season for crabs runs from the beginning of April until the last of November. Around springtime, watermen have emptied out their bushels of oysters and have already begun building their boxy wire traps, somewhat misleadingly called pots.
And, just as hibernating mammals emerge from winter, so do last summer’s surviving crabs— their meat having been soaked in what might be the culinary world’s longest marinade. These are the crustaceans, plump with meat and measuring from six to six and a half inches across, that are announced on giant chalkboard menus at crab houses and seafood wholesalers all over Maryland as “jumbos.”
Smaller “mediums” and “larges” even out the catch all season, but it’s commonly stated in Maryland that the best time to fetch jumbos is late summer and early fall, when the crabs that have been lucky enough to survive the season begin to bulk up for hibernation. My mother swears that these crabs are the sweetest.
Brrrraaaaccck a large sheet of brown paper complained as it was torn from a roll on the Waterman’s wall before being wafted over and weighed down by a mallet, a knife and plastic cups of melted butter and Old Bay Seasoning, the dressings that represent the diametric sweet and salty palate that governs a typical crab house spread. When the crabs arrived, they were truly jumbo.

Rico says there are three more pages so, if you care, click the post title and read it all...