My mom made her Maryland-style crab soup once a year, in mid-December, when my brother John traveled from San Diego to Hagerstown, Maryland to visit my parents for the holidays. Many of John’s lifelong friends lived in Maryland, so my mom would invite them all to the house for a huge seafood dinner. The appetizer was her crab soup, followed by crab cakes (more on those here), fried shrimp, filets mignon, baked potatoes, salad, summer corn, and then homemade pies and cookies for dessert. It was a gargantuan meal that took several enjoyable hours to eat. After the women did the dishes and cleaned up the kitchen, we all played poker into the wee hours. For me, this seafood dinner was even more enjoyable than Christmas itself.
My mom was diagnosed with stage two lung cancer in 2013. She opted for surgery to remove one lung and part of the other, followed by chemotherapy. While she recovered amazingly quickly after her surgery, the chemo knocked her on her ass. The seafood dinner would be impossible for her to pull off alone.
Finally, my mom, a lifelong control freak in her kitchen, let me in and taught me her recipe. Since I’m not a crab eater, I didn’t even know what the soup tasted like; I only knew that my brother and my husband and all our friends raved about it. It wasn’t always easy to learn from my mom. She assumed I knew nothing about the kitchen (even though I had had my own baking business and had been learning recipes from her for years). She instructed me on when to turn on the stove, how to measure water, how to chop vegetables. At the same time, she omitted tips I didn’t know, like how important it was to pick the shells from the crabmeat before adding it to the soup. Even so, the time I spent with Mom learning this recipe is some of the happiest of my life.
Since my mom died in the summer of 2015, I’ve been making her soup; happily, the seafood dinner traditional is still going strong, and it’s still my favorite meal of the year.
If you’ve got kids, or grandkids, or anyone in your circle who likes hanging out in the kitchen with you, I recommend teaching them your recipes. Don’t have any recipes? Then you can have this one. Play around with it, if you’d like. Make it your own, and then share it. It’s a lovely tradition.
The first thing you need for this soup is a nice big stockpot. Add eight cups of veggie stock to your pot and bring it to a boil. Add two cups of diced carrots, two cups of chopped onions, one and a half cups of chopped celery, a stick of butter, two tablespoons of Old Bay seasoning, one teaspoon of Old Bay Hot (if you like spice) and a tablespoon of worchestershire sauce and let all that simmer for thirty minutes.
Then, add three cups of diced potatoes and two cups of frozen corn and simmer another thirty minutes, stirring occasionally. A can of crushed tomatoes comes next; simmer for ten more minutes, then add two pounds of crabmeat that you’ve picked for shell. Turn down the heat, grab some bowls and a ladle, serve hot. Be gracious in accepting all the compliments you’re sure to get.
Click here to see the video, and here for just the recipe.
