Soft-shell crabs are Rick Baxter's livelihood. His family-owned company, Baxter Soft-shell Crabs, on the Eastern Shore, supplies the seasonal delicacy to restaurants in Maryland, Washington and Virginia.
It follows that soft-shell crabs would be a family staple.
But even in the Baxter home, soft-shell crabs were an acquired taste. "What my wife did the first time to get our kids to eat them, she cut them up in small pieces, dipped them in tempura mix. She fried them and put a plateful on the table," says Baxter, whose children are 10, 11 and 13.
"In 10 minutes, they were dipping them in ketchup and eating them like french fries," he says. "You don't see the whole crab and it's not looking at you."
The soft-shell season for blue crabs got off to a fat and plentiful start last month. At its peak, "We were doing 4,000 dozen a week, or better," Baxter says of his Easton-based business.
The soft-shell harvest has since slowed down a bit, according to Baxter, and will ebb and flow through September.
While the season lasts, soft-shell devotees will devour as many crabs as possible, sauteed, fried, grilled, topped with imperial, perched on slaw or tucked into kaiser rolls.
Others, though, may recoil at the thought of eating something with spindly legs more reminiscent of a spider than a dinner ingredient.
To avoid lifelong revulsion, introduction to soft-shell crabs should come at an early age. "I think if you get people to eat them when they're young, then they grow up liking them," Baxter says.
"You have to be a person who's adventurous and to want to try different things to begin with," says Dorothy Wockenfuss, a Baltimore native who spent her summers on the Eastern Shore. "As a child, we ate soft crabs. It's natural."
"The claws - they're creepy," says Bill Wockenfuss, who nevertheless also loves soft-shell crabs. He shares his wife's culinary spirit as they roam the United States in their mobile home armed with a copy of Roadfood, by Jane and Michael Stern.
For the chronically squeamish, there may be no hope. There are those, though, who can be led by the hand, if not the claw, to the pleasures of pure, velvety crab meat that isn't trapped in a hard, hot shell.
"We just had a person this past Sunday from Michigan who had never tried them," says Lou Ward, owner of the Bayou Restaurant in Havre de Grace. After ordering a sauteed soft crab, he said, "`I don't like the way this looks,'" Ward says. "So we fried up a sandwich and [he] thought it was great."
