In the 1950’s when I was in grade school once or twice a year we would get a call from my mother’s cousin in San Francisco and she and her husband would drive out to Niles, a small town where we lived in the East Bay now folded into the City of Fremont. It was usually a rainy Saturday or Sunday between St. Valentine’s Day and St. Patrick's Day. Late that afternoon my mother’s parents and other friends and cousins from both sides would pull into our long gravel driveway. The Martin’s would arrive with a large shopping bag with half a dozen round hard crusted loaves of Laraboru (sp?) Sour Dough French Bread and a gunny sack of Dungeness Crabs still warm from the steam pot where they were cooked. My parents would make sure the house was in order and dinning room table had the leaf in it. On these days a card table would be set up near it to hold what wouldn’t fit on the table. Unlike any other time the table would be covered with a thick layer of old newspapers not a table cloth. My mother would make a grocery run and make a big green salad and some other side dishes and bake pies for dessert. There would be wine, the heavy dark unfiltered old vines Zinfandel my Grandfather made every year from the grapes on a hillside in Woodside. There would also be white wine for my grandmother and the others who preferred it.
This traditional “crab feed” as it was always called was something that all the native Californians, both my Irish and Portuguese relatives loved and looked forward to as they had as long as anybody could remember. In New England they had clams and lobsters. In California we had pacific crab and abalone. The crab harvests are now bigger than ever but abalone is is now $50. a serving at the maybe half dozen places in the State that are able to buy it directly from divers.
In the kitchen the dozen crabs would be broken apart, the legs and claws going into big bowls or platters while my mother would break the meat out of the center of the crab and turn the ordinary green salad into a crab louis. Then the feast would begin. We would sit around the table with nutcrackers and metal picks and go after the meat in the legs and claws, the biggest pieces were in the claws. Each of us would make our special blend of condiments to go with the crab from bowls of lemon wedges, thick homemade chili sauce, horseradish, louie dressing, mayonnaise all with or without some tobasco sauce to bring it to the heat level they liked. The loaves of sour dough bread were sliced and we had butter not everyday margarine to spread on the slices. The crab was the main event, but the tangy chewy hard crispy crusted San Francisco sour dough was almost as much a treat since it was not available this far from the city at this time. We could by a good bread made in Oakland, but it never had or could have the “bite” of the real one baked in the city.
This was the 1950’s and dunginess crab was our favorite seafood and while not cheap, it was not so expensive that we didn’t have one or two of these crab dinners during the winter. In Maryland and Virginia families would do the same thing but with the little sweet blue crabs, in Florida they would feast on big thick shelled Stone Crab claws, in Louisiana at different times they would feast on crab or crayfish, gulf shrimp or oysters. The seafood would be boiled and eaten with gusto. Their tables were protected by a thick layer of newspapers too. And when dinner was over their would be a small mountain of shells that always brought on noisy brawl when the neighborhood cats gathered to fight over their crab feast.
As I wrote at the beginning, these were always gray rainy days, but they were also one of the high points of the year. A crab feed rate at the top feasts of the year along with my grandfather's Forth of July barbecue, Thanksgiving Day's turkey dinner and in early fall when my grandmother would cook the first wild mushrooms we would pick. My grandfather would go though the buckets of mushrooms and check each one and if it passed muster he put it into a basket, the doubtful ones went into the garbage.
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