Crabs

More delicate and versatile than their lofty cousins from Maine, Atlantic blue crabs are also more common than lobster. Charleston is famous for its She-Crab Soup, but crabmeat itself is so delicious that I hesitate to team it with dairy products, especially in warmer weather when crab is plentiful. When I was a child, crabbing was one of my favorite activities, even when I knew full well that I could probably catch more by simply putting out the family trap. In the fifties, when Cap’n Mac Holmes was the patriarch of Edisto Island, we would visit his children and grandchildren at his old house on the beach. There we’d sit spellbound by his Gullah tales of hurricanes and “haints” and fascinated by his cigar box of fossilized shark’s teeth, millions of years old. He was “Granddaddy” to all and headed up the old “yacht” club down at the wide and shallow mouth of the South Edisto River, on the southern tip of the island, where we loved to crab. It’s no wonder the Lowcountry saw the disappearance of good homemade chicken stock, given all the chicken parts we used to pull in crabs on the end of our weighted cotton twine.