A she crab or sook crab.
Crab
Here come de crab man!
She crab! She crab! She crab!
You tell him by he apron,
Walk back, jump back crab.
She crab! She crab! She crab!
There are two “eating” crabs favored by Carolinians: the blue crab (Callinectes sapidus)
and stone crab (Menippe mercenaria). The former come to market in two forms: hard or soft. Hard crabs: male Jimmies are favored over female sooks, though a female crab laden with eggs is the foundation for Charleston’s famous she-crab soup. The stone crab is harvested for a single mammoth claw and the living crab returned to the water to recycle its missing appendage. Available in the warm months, from May through October, blue crabs come to market abundantly near the coast and are purchased alive, except for “softies” which are often prepped (the dead man’s fingers removed) and frozen. Live Softshells appear in Spring and become a feature in restaurants and seafood markets. The last appear in late June. A consumer with good connections can obtain live hard crabs until January. Canned crab meat is expensive except for that sourced from Asia. The reduction in number of the processing houses along the east coast have contributed to the rise in price per pound of crab, with back fin being the highest grade, and claw meat less desirable. The stone crab has less extensive populations along the coast of South Carolina, their appearance in seafood markets episodic, and much of the catch reserved for restaurants that are willing to pay top dollar. On hindrance on the market for stone crabs has been the difficulty of harvesting them; they do not respond to baited lines and elude nets. Stone crabbers use an iron hook to wrest crabs out of their holes in oyster rocks in banks along the coast.
While crab recipes date from the the 1820s in the South, there was no commercial production of crabs until the 1873, when Captain John H. Landon began shipping soft shelled crabs out of Philadelphia, and 1878 James Macnamin of Hampton Virginia founded a cannery that shipped the meat of hard shelled crabs by rail throughout the eastern United States. In South Carolina the African American fishmonger, Charles H. Leslie, leveraged his many donations of fish specimens to American ichthyologists into knowledge of how to establish a Soft Shell Crab nursery in Mt. Pleasant. Charleston would enjoy a steady supply of softies every Spring from 1880 on thanks to Leslie’s impoundment across the Cooper River. In the 1880s a local scribe calculated that between 40,000 to 50,000 blue crabs a day were needed to feed Charleston during summer. The crustaceans lived in all the river, harbor, and coastal waters, but several grounds became famous for their concentrations: the shoals off East Battery, the shoals off Fort Sumter, the mouths of James Island the Wappoo Creeks. Those off the Battery fed on the ebb tide; those off Sumter on the flood. In the 1880s and 1890s approximately a hundred crab boats engaged in the harvest. Three-fifths of their catch was immediately purchased by hotels and restaurants. One-fifth appeared in Charles Leslie’s stalls in the Charleston fish market on the Cooper side of Bay Street. The remained were boiled and sold on the streets by vendors, who balanced trays of “Sea Crab” and “She Crab” on their heads while calling their wares through the city streets. There was no crab meat canning industry in South Carolina until the 1920s. Thereafter a network of plants came into being in the 1920s and 1930s—Bluffton (1935), Port Royal (1936), Lady Island (1938),
Crabs gave rise to numbers of the most famous Lowcountry dishes: boiled crab, deviled crab, potted crab, and crab soup all date before 1830. Crab salad and batter fried soft shells date from the 1870s. She crab soup & crab cakes (borrowed from Maryland) became fixtures in the 1930s. Bake crabmeat casseroles are a mid-20th century innovation. When crab pie was devised is the one mystery—did it date back to the 1840s when shrimp pie became a boarding house fixture in the Lowcountry, or did it emerge in the second quarter of the 20th century? It begins appearing in South Carolina cookbooks of the 1950s. Many family recipe collections include a crab soup/stew recipe, and also deviled crab. Yet the French chefs of New York City were fascinated by the stuffed crabs they encountered in visits southward. The greatest of America’s chefs, Charles Ranhofer of Delmonico’s included a recipe for one such dish in his famous cook book, Epicurean:
Deviled Crabs
“Deviled Crabs were comparatively unknown before the Civil War. In those days people were content to open a crab for what it was worth, or to dally with a crab salad.” The dish became famous in Philadelphia before 1810 as made by the African-American restaurateur Isaiah LeCount (1803-1853). It made its way port city by port city southward. Its great champion in Charleston was black caterer Tom Tully (1828-1883), who made it a fixture in city banquets during the 1860s. His culinary pupils staffed the restaurants and hotels of Reconstruction Charleston and made it a menu staple. The recipe that evolved in the city invited personal adjustment for taste. The ingredients were standard, the proportions variable:
The devilment in the recipe was provided by the mustard. The tomato ketchup component was a late 19th century innovation, and the ketchup employed used substantially less sweetener that modern catsups with their liberal dosing of corn syrup.
She crab soup’s importance as a signature dish prompts us to give it a separate entry. But we should note that its popularization after 1930 obviated the need for local restaurateurs to embrace the cream napped crab dishes that spread through America’s hotel restaurants—crab imperial and its ilk.
The most recent fashion in Carolina crab cookery is the growing popularity of crab rice, a Gullah home preparation that Sean Brock and other chefs have embraced. Aromatic and wholesome, it is a surprisingly simple yet impactful preparation.
Sources: “Crabs on the Half Shell,” Charleston News and Courier (February 24, 1883), 1. Charles Ranhofer, The Epicurean (New York, 1920 2nd edition), 405. James Henry Rice, Jr., “Marine Wealth of the State Crab Industry,” The State (January 23, 1920), “Beaufort Turning to Can Industry,” Charleston News & Courier (August 14, 1939), 3. “Hardy Gourmets Still Go for Stone Crab,” Charleston News and Courier (November 1, 1953), 10. David S. Shields, Southern Provisions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 194-96. “Blue Crabs,” DNR Sea Science (Charleston: South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, 2014): http://www.dnr.sc.gov/marine/pub/seascience/bluecrab.html .
Thanks for the information on this. Didn't realise there was such a rich tradition tied to crabs in the area and great food (pun intended) for thought.