crab
For some reason we didn’t have many chances to eat crab until recently.Boston is of course a part of the lobster empire and on multiple occasions our friends insisted that we participate in a murderous business of cooking and eating them. We lived practically next door to Barking Crab, but there are so many good options to eat out in Boston and the place had all the fixings of a tourist trap that we only tried it once.
On the way to Georgia we scarfed crabcakes couple of times and once - in Maryland - even a soft shell crab sandwich. But no skills are required to eat that.
As a result we are full fledged newbies when we arrive at the end of the road at Sunbury Crab Company. It’s a family owned place with open terraces on the river. The scenery is unreal. You sit outside drinking your cold beer, look at the endless grassland and have no worries in life. Except that we do: crabs arrive in a bucket accompanied with 2 wooden mallets, numerous napkins and enough paper to cover a minor island. What they don’t come with is an instruction manual. Checking YouTube at this point seems too geeky even for us. And looking around doesn’t really help. It’s relatively early for dinner and the few patrons present apparently opted for some easier options since no one else is handling any blunt implements.
Pretending like we know what we are doing (beer starts working its magic by now) we attack the crabs mercilessly. At the end of my first one I am exhausted physically and emotionally from all the pounding, ripping apart and sucking on random shell fragments. Our Boston foodie friend and neighbor and her husband taught us that meat hides in the darnest places.
No one in the restaurant pays any attention to us, so either they too polite to gawk or we are doing it more or less correctly. Next time the waitress stops to ask if everything is OK I admit we are not sure if we know what we are doing. She takes one look at the throw-away bucket and apparently satisfied she utters what sounds to us like the most beautiful sentence in English: Y’all doing great. Just whack the hell out of them.
Which we do. For another hour.
