TYLERTON -- The aroma hits as soon as the screen door to the Drum Point Market swings closed. It wafts up from behind the ice cream cooler, near the cracker packs and stacked boxes of Jell-O, filling up the garage-sized general store in this remote Smith Island town.
The regulars - hardened watermen, tourists who keep coming back - know that smell. Those are Mary Ada Marshall's crab cakes in the deep fryer, and they might just be the best in the world.
In a place where crab is king and every island lady has her own closely guarded recipe, that claim is no small boast. But from the crab shanties lining the wooden docks to the homey living room in Tylerton's lone bed and breakfast, the story is the same: If Mary Ada's crab cakes aren't the best, they come pretty darn close.
"I'm pretty much a connoisseur of crab cakes, and you'll find none better," says Bobby Smith, a boat captain who grew up on the island and estimates that he's tried 300 types of crab cakes in his lifetime. "And the best part about it is that it's made with crab meat caught in the area, not that foreign mess you get anywhere else."
The lure of Marshall's crab cake has brought people to the island just for lunch - a trip that includes a drive to Crisfield and then an hour's ferry ride over choppy Tangier Sound to the most isolated of Smith Island's three villages. It has gotten the 59-year-old island native a tour of the White House at Christmas and a visit to the upper reaches of the State Department. And it has helped keep afloat a small country store that is the lifeblood of an island struggling daily against rising tides and falling crab harvests.
Marshall began making these crab cakes about 12 years ago, when her oldest son, Duke, bought the land and, with his brother Kevin, built the Drum Point Market. The island had lost its store the year before and Duke, an insurance agent who lives in Crisfield, wanted a product to bring in visitors as well as islanders. Nothing says Smith Island like a crab cake, molded with meat picked by the island ladies from crabs caught by the island men.
There was only one problem: Mary Ada Marshall is allergic to crab meat.
She'd discovered her seafood allergy a few years before Duke opened the market, when a piece of shrimp sent her into anaphylactic shock and she nearly died before reaching the mainland. When she recovered, she knew she'd never be able to eat crab cakes again.
