Tag: crab

Crab Meltaways, Juliana “Jukie” Todd

Open just about any Maryland community cookbook from the 1980s, and you’re likely to find a recipe for Crab Meltaways. They’re easy, tasty, and great for company.

Most recipes call for “Kraft Old English Cheese Spread,” a product that, as far as I can tell, debuted in the 1930s. It is likely that the recipe for Crab Meltaways (also known as “Crabbies”) was developed by Kraft in the 1960s, but there are other variations without the product. John Shields included a recipe from Susan Corsaro in his 1992 “Chesapeake Bay Crab Cookbook,” using cheddar cheese, fresh garlic, and parsley.

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The ingredients are gently mixed, piled atop split English muffins (often cut into wedges), and frozen. From the frozen state, they broil into a bubbly melted pile of deliciousness.

One of my recipes suggests canned crabmeat because these don’t really necessitate the good stuff.

Jukie Todd from Crisfield didn’t have that concern. A lifetime employee of her family’s MeTompkin Bay Oyster Company, she surely had plenty of crab to work with. Her recipe was included in the Women’s Ministries Faith Fellowship Church’s 1989 cookbook, unfortunately named “Plantation Favorites.” Todd had died in 1986, so the recipe must have been shared by friend or family.

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Crab Cakes, Mrs. Nell C. Westcott

“[The Eastern Shore’s] biggest booster lives in Chestertown,” wrote W.C. Thurston in the preface to his book The Eastern Shore (of Maryland) In Song and Story. She was “a fair daughter of the Shore who typed two stories for us when we needed only one.”

Westcott contributed two odes to the book, one to the Eastern Shore in general, and one written to honor the Ann McKim, the “first of the Baltimore clippers”, “adored by all the skippers.”

Westcott was born Nellie Charlotte Schneider in 1887 to Louis H Schneider and Nellie S Ernesty, residents of Washington DC. In 1900, Nell was living in New York with her mother and teaching music. According to Nell’s mothers 1932 obituary, the elder Nellie was founder of her town library and active in the civic and social life of Pleasant Valley, New York.

In 1910 or 1911, Nell married Fred B. Westcott from New Jersey. Their daughter Dorothy was born in 1911. The couple and their children settled back in Chestertown by 1930. There, Nell worked for the government in the employment office and the Chamber of Commerce, but found time to pen a column in the Chestertown Enterprise of tidbits, notes, and praise for her home region. As secretary for the Chamber of Commerce, she had dealings in issues ranging from poultry farms brokering Thanksgiving turkeys to the groundwork for the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.

Nell C. Westcott was just the type of person to end up on the radar of Frederick Phillip Stieff when he was compiling Eat, Drink & Be Merry in Maryland. That book includes Nell’s recipes for Crab Cakes, Potato Rolls, Oyster Pie, Lemon Butter, and Rusks.

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Crab Olio

Definition of olio
2a: a miscellaneous mixture : HODGEPODGE
⁠— Merriam-Webster

It didn’t take too many years of research for me to come to the disappointing realization that a lot of the romantic notions I’d held about recipes were simply not true. “Recipes” are not exact formulas. They can never really live up to the promise of conjuring up an exact place or time. Authenticity is a nebulous and possibly meaningless concept. Few recipes are truly as regional as we’d like to believe. Even fewer recipes were “invented” by any one cook or chef in some inspired moment.

Take the iconic crab cake: the ultimate ‘Maryland’ food. When I search for crab cakes in pre-1900s newspapers I find menu listings and recipes from Pennsylvania, California, New York, Texas, Kentucky… and more.

Other favorite recipes originated as corporate promotions, taking on a life of their own in the hands of home cooks until their unexciting origins become obscured.

I’ve come to accept all of this and I’ve largely dispensed with hierarchies of recipe value and validity.

Having said all that, how do I feel when I find a unique recipe, so unmistakably Maryland, created by a cook and spread organically by word of mouth? Pretty intrigued.

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Maryland Chowder, Duchess of Windsor

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It’s pretty rare that I should have *too much information* about a person associated with a recipe. For years now I’ve sighed in frustration when all I can find on someone is a date of birth, a passing newspaper mention, a headstone.

This week’s recipe comes from a woman who has been so scrutinized and written about that there is practically no point in summarizing her life story.

Wallis Simpson, The Duchess of Windsor, remains a fascinating figure to many. Any time members of the British royal family come up in the news, many Baltimoreans like to reflect on our city’s brush with royalty.

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