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crab feast

Last Sunday, Rob and I met up with Michaela and some of her friends for dinner at Gunning’s, a “hit the crab with the mallet” restaurant outside of Baltimore. It was my first time attempting such a feat, so it was a rather novel experience for me. Michaela, Katherine and Josh, all Marylanders, were old hats at this, though, and offered plenty of advice and encouragment along the way as I tried to pick apart my two jumbo crabs.

The whole exercise was rather surreal. The crab meat itself was wonderful — and slathered in so much spicy Old Bay seasoning that my lips were tingly by the end. But the act of getting to that crab meat was a new thing for me. Ordering a crab cake sandwich or a hamburger, I’m quite divorced from the reality of where that meat came from, as the final meal has no resemblance to the original animal. Here, I’m hacking apart the carcass of what was once a living, crawling, pinchy thing, then picking out former organs to get to the meat of the animal. It’s a very real, primal thing. And while our dinner table conversation purposely evaded the subject to avoid disturbing the squeamish, it’s hard not to think about the fact that there’s nothing “refined” about this: We’re battering these crabs with mallets so we can pick out the meat with our bare hands.

Still, it was an interesting experience — one I might consider trying again sometime — and fun send-off for Michaela, who left the next day to return to her fellowship program in Kenya.

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