Dungenous crab, pilers, eat-as-you-go, and "the bus"
Dungeness crab has always been a staple in my family’s diet. Growing up in the pacific northwest my parents and siblings and I would go crabbing on the Puget sound…
Dungeness crab has always been a staple in my family’s diet. Growing up in the pacific northwest my parents and siblings and I would go crabbing on the Puget sound and come home with buckets full of Dungeness crab. We would cook them fresh (as a kid I always cried when we put the live crabs in the boiling pot) and get ready to eat them by putting newspaper down on the table and setting out crab crackers.
In my family, there are two ways to eat your crab. The first way is you crack the shell and pull out the meat and eat it as you go, tossing the shell onto the newspaper. The other way is to pile the meat on your plate until you’ve cracked the entire crab then eat it all at once.
The joke is that if you pile your crab a bus will come and hit you and everyone else will get to eat your pile of crab. But if it hits someone who eats as they go then they will at least have had some delicious crab beforehand. So anytime we’re eating crab and we notice someone is piling their crab we always joke “Better hurry up, the bus is coming”.
When we’re all finished eating we gather up the newspaper with the shells on it and throw it in the compost. The only dishes we have to do are the boiling pot, a few plates, and some crab crackers so it’s a very easy meal.
When my friends from the east coast came to visit they were shocked at how big the crabs were and they were delighted by the fact they could just put the shells on the table. Whenever I ate blue crab on the Chesapeake Bay with my Maryland friends I always joked that the bus was coming…no one got it.
About TOTA
TOTA.world provides cultural information and sharing across the world to help you explore your Family’s Cultural History and create deep connections with the lives and cultures of your ancestors.
