A celebrity is in town.
I'm not talking about some movie star, head of state or athlete. I'm talking about something with substance, texture, and a devoted constituency. I'm talking about the soft-shell crab. It is the best eats in the region, if not the world.
Paradoxically, while this week's hard crabs have been hard to find and pricey, by the end of the week soft crabs, crabs without their shells, were both plentiful and relatively inexpensive. Whales, the largest soft crabs, were selling three for $9 on Thursday, jumbos, the next size down, were three for $8.
Both Bill Devine at Faidley's seafood in the Lexington Market and Tommy Chagouris of Nick's Inner Harbor Seafood in the Cross Street Market told me they had plenty of local soft crabs.
They also explained to me, as best they could, why hard crabs, crabs with shells, were expensive, and crabs without their shells, soft crabs, were not. Part of the reason was demand. Most people buy hard crabs by the dozen, and they buy soft crabs one or two at a time. So a merchant who has two dozen soft crabs will not usually sell them out as fast as he would two dozen hard crabs. Moreover, crab houses predominantly offer cooked hard crabs.
Part of the reason is nature. A hard crab is the same creature as a soft crab; the only difference is when they are caught. A crab that is soft, or without its shell, one day will get a new shell and become "hard" a few days later. If watermen catch large crabs when they are soft, there will be fewer hard crabs to catch a few days later.
That happened recently. As friends of the soft crab will tell you, the start of the local soft crab season is timed with the first full moon in May. For some reason, when the May moon is full, many crabs in the Chesapeake Bay shed their hard skins. Watermen are ready to scoop up the shell-free crabs and ship them to market.
While no one is certain why there is a relationship between a full moon and peeling, when I think about my youthful adventures the link makes sense. As I recall, whenever the May moon was full, the people I went to college with felt the urge to shed their clothes. And usually campus police were there to scoop up "the peelers."
Anyway, the full moon has worked its magic, and crabs, they are a-peelin'.
