The days were longer, the breezes were warmer and a couple of soft crabs were sizzling in my skillet. Life was looking good.
Around Memorial Day, some eaters get a hankering for hard crabs. Not this boy. I go for the soft stuff, the rich, delectable flavor of soft-shell crabs.
Blue crabs shed their shells all summer long. But in the spring, when the Chesapeake Bay waters warm, the moon is full and the locust trees bloom, large numbers slip out of their old hard shells.
Chesapeake Bay watermen like Tony Rippons of TNT Crab Co. on Hooper Island, on the Eastern Shore, scoop up crabs that are showing signs of shedding their shells. They keep them in crab floats for the shedding process, then send them to market.
Soft crabs are, in my opinion, the best-tasting critters that swim in the Chesapeake Bay. But they are not for the squeamish. They are often alive, if not too frisky, when you buy them. On a recent Saturday afternoon as Mark Devine pulled some "softs" out of the walk-in refrigerator at Faidley's Seafood in Baltimore's Lexington Market, I could see that their mouths were still moving. These were "whales," the name traditionally given for the largest of soft crabs with their soft shells measuring, according to the Web site blue-crab.org, 5 1/2 inches or more.
The next size down would be "jumbos," measuring 5 to 5 1/2 inches, then "primes," measuring 4 1/2 inches to 5, "hotels," spanning 4 to 4 1/2 inches, and "mediums," 3 1/2 to 4 inches.
I went for a couple of "whales" because I like my soft crabs big and plump. Prices rise and fall with supply and demand, but these whales on this day were selling for $6.50 each.
Next came the step known as "cleaning the soft crabs." This is a polite way of saying you dispatch the crabs and snip off various parts of their bodies.
I was born in Dodge City, Kan., but now think of myself as a local. In the 29 years I have lived in the state, I have caught and steamed my own crabs, I have reeled in and cleaned big rockfish and I have pried open oysters. But the single transforming action - the step that changed me, in my mind, from a "come-here" to a "Marylander" - has been cleaning soft crabs.
Once you have held live soft crabs in your hands, cut off their eyes and mouths, removed their "sand bag" stomachs, snipped off their "aprons," which look like the Washington Monument on males and a perfect triangle on females, and snipped off their spongy gills, you are not a Kansan anymore.
