Crab Soup – the Maryland tradition
I spent much of my boyhood in Maryland where red crab soup vied with white crab soup for the hearts of Tidewater’s epicures. I lived for twenty years in Charleston where William Deas’s famous She-Crab Soup was a signature of Lowcountry cuisine for the last half of the twentieth century. I’ve indulged in long study trips to New Orleans where Crab Gumbo remained a jewel in the crown of Creole cookery. I believe I’ve had every form of crab soup ever to have won fame in the South, including the Soft Shell Crab Gumbo served by Delmonico’s during the Gilded Age and by high end southern hotels since.
I’ve been thinking about crab soup for some time. The earliest recipes reveal a strange range of approaches. In Mrs B. C. Howard’s Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen (1873) betrays the oldest, fear-tinged attitude to cooking crustaceans. In her recipe for “White Crab Soup” she creates a stock by cracking legs and fins and boiling them for one and a half hours, then the “prepared crabs” are added and cooked for additional half and hour before milk is added. This extended cooking (some would call overcooking) of the crab is standard until the final decades of the 19th century. In Elizabeth Watts’s Fish and How to Cook It (1866), “a large crab [should] boil a half an hour” (97). Because crabs fed on dead waste in the water, all of the fears that attached to carrion eaters was projected onto crabs. Indeed, there were religious prohibitions against eating them by observant Jews and some sectarian Christians. The current health recommendation for boiling a large blue crab is from 15 minutes for a jimmy to 20 minutes for a Jumbo in shell.
What did Mrs B C Howard mean by prepared crab? Not what 21st century retailers mean, which is steamed, picked, and packaged crab meat. In Mrs. Howard’s day that was what was meant by “dressed crab.” Mrs. Howard’s “prepared”means crabs that had their carapace cracked and the dead men’s fingers removed. It must be said that Mrs. Howard’s approach for all its overcooking, would be tasty for the flavor of the shells would infuse the stock. At the end of the 19th century the development of a canning industry in the Chesapeake made steamed picked crabmeat (back fin & claw meat) available for the hotel and restaurant trade, and for well-heeled consumers too. This steamed meat lacked any crab fat, and consumers fixated on the whiteness rather than greyness of the product. Mrs. Charles H. Gibson’s Maryland and Virginia Cookbook (1894) reflected the new school of “chafing dish” crab cookery in which steamed prepared crabmeat was used, cooking times were minimized and the sauce matrix mattered tremendously, particularly when it was a White Crab Soup being prepared. The White Crab Soup became a fixture at the Baltimore Clubs—The Merchant Club, the Maryland Club. The White Crab Soup excluded crab fat because butter, and cream provided the lipids for the floury white sauce that was finished with Madeira.
Chef Paul Monnier serves Crab Soup to the Fraternal Order of the Orioles June 1911
White Crab Soup was made and served in rooms. [Note: White Crab Soup was never called Crab Bisque in Maryland; prior to 1930 New Orleans was the only southern city that designated flour and cream crab soup as bisque.] Red Crab Soup was developed as an event soup, robust, and more intensely flavored--something prepared for the open air. It made use of crab fat because it worked well with tomatoes and peppers. The early Maryland versions did not employ okra. They sometimes did include peppers. They were not gumbos. Rather they were more akin to the red seafood event dishes found in the South: red catfish stew, red cooter soup, and Pine Bark Stew. While there was a tendency in some of these southern event soups to use tomato ketchup as the red agent rather than tomatoes; there was no such inclination in Maryland. Nor was Worcestershire Sauce part of the formula prior to the 1930s. There was, however, a suggestion that African Americans were the champions of the red variety in Maryland. When the Baltimore Sun was printing a column of African American recipes in the early 1920s under the by-line “Aunt Priscilla” the kind of Crab Soup she offered was red:
Baltimore Sun, July 7, 1922 (4)
Among the Maryland clubs a contest culture emerged over the twentieth century in which cooks aspired to preeminence. At crab feasts the Crab Soup Contest became a fixture. Because the camps of partisans had become so fixed, judging was performed in two categories: white and red. To assert that a white soup was greater than the red, or vice versa would spark tumult. A 1985 wire service story about the Annapolis Crab Cook-Off suggests an increasing broad mindedness may have crept into the world of crab connoisseurship as the twentieth century wore on. Judges added a third “grab bag” category: “These cooks didn’t share one prize. There were three different categories. The first two were best tomato based, or red, crab soup and best cream of crab, or white, crab soup. Both of these prizes were determined by a distinguished panel of judges. The third category, best crab soup without regard to race, creed, or color, was determined by a pack of egalitarian eaters who each paid $3 admission” [“Crab Soup Winners Differ,” Daytona Beach Morning Journal (August 8, 1985), 58.]
The sensible people of Maryland decided there was no one crab soup shortly after 1900. When a reader sent a letter to a Maryland newspaper request a recipe for crab soup, the editor or columnist would invariably supply two. Consider the March 23, 1908 issue of the Baltimore American: