There it was, staring at me in the freezer while I was cleaning it out. A package of frozen crabs that my late husband and his brother had caught, cleaned, and packaged for us to take home when we visited them years ago in Straits, a down east community near Harker’s Island, NC. I knew right then it would be a good day for a crab stew.
I learned very early in my marriage that I had better like seafood. My experience with “seafood” was an occasional stew my mom would fix, or going out to eat on Friday nights with my mom and dad to whatever restaurant happened to be serving fried fish that night. When the kids were small, we spent many weekends at the cottage fishing, setting crab pots to catch fresh crabs and gigging flounder out in front of the house when Core Sound was as slick as glass. Some of our fondest memories were spent in moonlit nights gigging for flounder. There was an art to it. The flounder were very hard to see but my husband was an expert aim. The trick was getting them in the boat. Once we got them to the boat, we had these huge tubs to put them in. My husband learned from his dad and grandaddy how to clean crabs. We would get some old fish that was in the freezer and load up the crab pots and take the boat out in front of the house and dump them in the water. Hours later, we’d ride back out and bring them back to this rickety old boat dock. We would then work for what seemed like hours dressing and cleaning the crabs to be frozen later. The bounty we caught on those summer weekends we put in the freezer for good winter eating.
Speaking of eating, a crab stew was an event in of itself. There are many variations of fish and seafood stews I’m sure in every part of the world, but good ole eastern North Carolina stew is hard to beat. Render the bacon, add some onions, red pepper, black pepper, and salt. Then add your potatoes and cook til just about done, being careful not to stir too much. Add the crabs and it didn’t take long once they are added. Once the stew had cooled, I would serve the crabs and we would spend the next 30-some-odd minutes searching for the crab meat and not wasting a bit. I would always seem to leave too much, my kids would clean up my mess. We were left with chins that were dripping with the flavors of the stew that it was cooked in. We then had to all get up from the table to wash our hands and face!
As families often do, they grow, change, expand, and members are lost. What we are left with are sweet memories of times past, traditions, heritages, that forever link us to a time, a place, or in this case, a simple meal with loved ones. What we did not realize we were doing was making memories to last a lifetime.Tonight’s stew brought back those familiar smells and tastes of times past, along with the echoes of laughter we had sitting around the dinner table.
