[Chat] NY Times: "In Bawlmer, Hon, Crab Is King"

WeinsteinM at aol.com WeinsteinM at aol.com
Wed Feb 19 15:07:57 EST 2003


Always nice to see our hometown get some national recognition!

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In Bawlmer, Hon, Crab Is King

New York Times
February 19, 2003
By R. W. APPLE Jr. 

"BALTIMORE is a quirky kind of town," its former mayor,
Kurt Schmoke, said not long ago. "Its heart is still
working class, even if the economic realities have changed.
It is suspicious of anything elegant or stylish or
pretentious. We have this world-famous educational
institution, Johns Hopkins, in our midst, but it has never
quite won the affection of ordinary Baltimoreans." 

You can see that spirit in the refreshingly unpompous local
politicians, including the two senators, a tough,
wisecracking Polish-American, Barbara Mikulski, and a
reserved, cerebral Greek-American, Paul Sarbanes, as well
as William Donald Schaefer, a wacky former mayor and
governor who once settled a bet by diving into the seal
pool at the National Aquarium. You can see it in the city's
sports heroes, gritty men like Frank Robinson, Johnny
Unitas and Cal Ripken, who never blew their own horns. 

And you can see it in the work of Baltimore's favorite-son
moviemakers, John Waters, who celebrated beehive hairdos,
and Barry Levinson, who fondly explored the world of siding
salesmen. Both like to set their films in their hometown,
in what the iconoclastic Mr. Waters calls "this gloriously
decrepit, inexplicably charming city." 

The standard form of greeting is "hon," a term of
endearment commemorated by a faux-50's restaurant called
Cafe Hon in Hampden, up north near the main Hopkins campus
and the national Lacrosse Hall of Fame. 

Baltimore's eating habits are idiosyncratic, too. The city
loves crabs, oysters and rockfish from Chesapeake Bay,
which its poet laureate, H. L. Mencken, once described as
"an immense protein factory." It prefers diners and taverns
tucked into venerable row houses to newer, trendier spots.
It shops in the city's old-fashioned covered markets, a
half-dozen of them - the only places except the Ravens and
the Orioles games where all of Baltimore comes together,
blue-collar and blue-blooded, black and white, Greeks and
Italians and Germans. 

Crab is king. People here can't live without their crab
soup, their crab cakes and especially their spicy steamed
blue crabs, which they rip open, split in two, crack with a
wooden mallet and prod with a knife, excavating every last
bite of sweet snowy meat with all the fervor of an
Egyptologist opening a pharaoh's tomb. In the winter
months, when the big hard-shells - scientific name
Callinectes sapidus, which means beautiful swimmer - are
not available locally, the leading purveyors fly them in
from ports in the South. 

Unhappily, most visitors miss the best of Bawlmer eating.
Taking the line of least resistance, they stop at the
unfortunate mass feederies along the north side of the
Inner Harbor, or at commercialized, gentrified crab houses
like Obrycki's, or in Little Italy. Marty Katz, a Baltimore
photographer and food critic who took the pictures that
accompany this article, dismisses the copycat restaurants
in that neighborhood as "our versions of Mamma Leone's." 

My nominee for the single best crab dish in Baltimore, if
not the Western Hemisphere, is the jumbo lump crab cake at
Faidley's Seafood in the Lexington Market, which was
founded in 1782 and refurbished only recently. 

You eat it standing up, at a counter or at a table with no
chairs. Nancy Faidley Devine, 67, makes every one herself,
including those she ships by mail, and last Christmas week
she shipped 2,800. 

"Other people handle the stuff too much," she told me, "and
it ruins the cake's texture," the same way that overworking
sometimes toughens a pie crust. 

In summer, Faidley's crab meat comes from packinghouses in
Wingate and Crisfield, Md., farther down the bay, and in
winter it comes from Texas, Florida and North Carolina.
Mrs. Devine won't use imported crab meat - "pretty," she
said, "but no flavor" - and she won't use pasteurized crab
meat, because it has a flat, metallic taste. 

She said she watches carefully to make sure the meat
contains plenty of yellowish "mustard," or fat, which is as
important to the flavor of a crab cake as marbling is to
the flavor of a sirloin. 

Faidley's sells a crab cake made from claw meat for $4.50
and one made from backfin for $7.95 as well as the jumbo
lump cake at $12.95. Each is seasoned differently and each
has its virtues, but the costliest one, about the size of a
slightly flattened Major League baseball, deep-fried to a
golden turn, with crisp little hills and dales all around,
is well worth the premium. 

Delicate, delicious, creamy and sweet, it may not quite be
heaven, but by my reckoning it's a persuasive preview. 

Mrs. Devine is canny about her recipe, except to say that
it contains only a touch of Baltimore's ubiquitous Old Bay
Seasoning, which can impart a harsh taste, plus broken
saltines for body, mayonnaise, several mustards and spices.
Her husband, Bill, 71, a retired naval officer who never
lost the habit of salty talk, said the secret would die
with his wife. "I sleep with her," he added, "and she won't
tell me." 

IT takes 20 minutes or so to drive to Dundalk, just east of
the city line, where giant maritime cranes serve the docks,
and the huge Sparrows Point mill spews out smoke and
hot-rolled steel. The Costas Inn is there, a bluejeans and
Cat hat tavern disguised as a crab house. Several of the
Baltimore feinschmeckers I talked to said it serves the
best steamed crabs in town, and it certainly impressed me. 

You get the whole proletarian nine yards: Lots of good
beer on draught, including amber-colored Pennsylvania-made
Yuengling, from the nation's oldest brewery; stacks of
paper towels (not napkins) to clean up with; tables covered
with heavy butcher paper; the spice-slathered crabs dumped
unceremoniously in front of you from plastic trays. 

And what crabs! Crab houses here describe size in terms of
price, and the ones my friend and I ordered were 44's,
meaning they cost $44 a dozen. Huge brutes, heavy, full of
luscious meat. Three each were plenty after a bowl of spicy
Maryland crab soup, rich with vegetables. When we finished,
our lips were stinging, our fingers were smeared with
reddish gunk and a tumulus of shell and cartilage rose
before each of us. Finger bowls were not provided. 

Taverns, the prototypical Baltimore eating places, come in
many varieties. Two of the best, in addition to Costas, are
Duda's, a laid-back bar facing the water in Fells Point,
which serves what may be the best hamburger in the city, a
plump disk of meat grilled to moist, deep-red perfection,
and Henninger's, a sweetheart of a back-street
establishment in the same neighborhood, where I felt like a
regular after two minutes. 

Henninger's décor is eclectic, to say the least, featuring
old black-and-white publicity photos of strippers alongside
a tapestry portrait of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy
and Martin Luther King. The food has ambition. When I
stopped in, the menu included fried oysters on a bed of
spinach with fennel and Pernod sauce, cooked by Jayne
Vieth, and thin-sliced brisket of beef, deftly smoked by
her husband, Kenny. The two of them own the little place. 

Baltimore is a good breakfast town, too. Movie buffs should
try the Hollywood Diner, a streamlined chrome beauty not
far from the courthouse. This is where Boogie, Eddie,
Fenwick and their friends, all of them afraid of growing
up, hung out in the Barry Levinson classic, "Diner" (1982).
Get there before 9 a.m. and you can have an egg and cheese
on toast for only 99 cents. 

If civilized talk and an unhurried session with the
newspapers is your morning game, Baltimore provides City
Cafe. The bagels are Manhattan-worthy, and the oatmeal is
Ohio-worthy. Blue Moon, a hip cubbyhole all but impossible
to get into on weekends, makes everything from scratch,
including smoothies, cinnamon rolls and potato pancakes
laced with bacon and green pepper. The scrapple is to die
for: cut thin, fried crisp on the outside, molten on the
inside. No easy thing to achieve, that. 

In Helmand, Baltimore has the most unlikely of ethnic
restaurants, an upmarket Afghan place, run by Qayum Karzai,
brother of the Afghan head of state, no less. Its kaddo
(sautéed pumpkin) and choppan (charcoaled rack of lamb)
merit the raves they win from local critics year after
year. 

Attman's is something else again in the ethnic line, a deli
in business since 1915 whose corned beef - a bit grainy, a
bit sour, not too salty - deserves to be mentioned in the
same breath with New York's best. You have to wait in a
long line at lunchtime for Attman's bulging sandwiches, Dr.
Brown's cream soda, half-sour dills and all-sour pickled
onions. The 1100 block of Lombard Street is called "Corned
Beef Row," but most of it is a wasteland now, except for
Attman's and the slightly ersatz Lenny's, whose Kelly green
paint job gives it away. 

I wish I could wax as enthusiastic about Baltimore's famous
pit beef. They serve it in joints on Route 40, the Pulaski
Highway, a real boulevard of broken dreams, lined with
cheap motels and shabby car lots. The beef is top round,
dry-rubbed, grilled over charcoal, sliced thin, slapped
into a kaiser roll and painted with horseradish. 

My friend Calvin Trillin, down from New York, came along
for a taste test. At Big Fat Daddy's, a sullen kid served
us drab, dried-out mystery meat that reminded me of
boarding school. We found the sandwich at Big Al's O.K., if
not a tenth as enticing as the spiced beef sandwiches
Chicago loves. 

A busy port for more than 250 years, Baltimore has long had
a sizable Greek population, which gathers at Samos, across
from the Orthodox church on Oldham Street in East
Baltimore. In this row-house neighborhood you see two of
the other things that set the city apart: white marble
steps called stoops and facades of Formstone, a
cement-based falseface for porous brick. 

Nick Georgalas presides in the kitchen at Samos. Tall,
mustached, fierce-eyed, he looks like the partisan fighter
that his father was, and he is one of those cooks who gives
new life to culinary clichés. His grilled shrimp had too
much dried oregano for me, but his dolmades, his souvlaki,
his tsatziki and his grilled pita were worth much more than
the modest prices asked. 

The Black Olive in Fells Point, also Greek-owned, gets in
trouble because its prices are high. Many people are
reluctant to spend real money for Greek food (and Chinese
food), which is a mistake. Owned by Stelios Spiliadis,
whose brother runs Milos in New York, Black Olive is built
around a display of fish from far and wide, which are
presented atop a bank of ice: red snapper from the Gulf of
Mexico, turbot from the North Sea, daurade from the
Mediterranean, striped bass from the Chesapeake (which
Marylanders call rockfish, supposedly because the best ones
were once caught off the port of Rock Hall). 

Simply grilled or pan-fried, dressed with a squirt of lemon
and a few drops of best extra virgin olive oil, the fish is
fabulous. So are the mezes, or starters, especially the
chunky hummus and the olives, which are house-marinated in
zaatar, a Middle Eastern spice combination that includes
sumac, crushed sesame seeds and a thymelike regional herb
from a woody bush. 

YOU'LL accuse me of stretching a point, but I would include
the Women's Industrial Exchange in this roll call of ethnic
eating in Baltimore. Founded in 1880 as a means of helping
needy gentlewomen earn an income, it has been going strong
ever since on the same corner of North Charles Street,
selling handmade craft articles in the front room and
handmade WASP food - plain, unadorned, old-fashioned,
superbly ordinary American food - in the back room. 

Outside Greenwich and Locust Valley, there aren't many
cheerleaders these days for WASP food, but if a few more
serious eaters would try the industrial exchange (closed
for renovation until late spring) maybe that would change.
How's this for lunch: a pile of the best chicken salad
you've ever tasted, a block of ruby-red tomato aspic and a
deviled egg, for a big $6.75? Add a cupcake - yes, a
cupcake - or a wedge of lemon meringue pie for $3. 

Mencken fans will have noticed a few things missing. The
old grouch was a great drinker who called himself
"omnibibulous" and described the dry martini as "the only
American invention as perfect as a sonnet." He was a great
eater, who termed crab à la creole "the most magnificent
victual yet devised by mortal man." But much of Mencken's
Baltimore is gone, despite the city's predilection for the
tried and true. 

The hometown beer, National Bohemian, the beloved Natty
Boh, is brewed in North Carolina now. Other icons of the
Teutonic culinary culture have vanished as well, including
many of Mencken's favorite restaurants, like Miller
Brothers, where my father took me as a lad to eat turtle
soup; Schellhase's, where Mencken's Saturday Night Club
met, and Haussner's, which was stuffed with paintings and
sculptures that brought more than $10 million at auction
when it closed down. You can still find a snickerdoodle
cookie, but sour beef and dumplings, Baltimore's version of
sauerbraten, is disappearing fast. 

Depressing to report, Marconi's, a deliciously
anachronistic French-Italian salon on Saratoga Street, has
lost much of its charm, thanks to an aesthetically criminal
remodeling ordered by its new owner, Peter Angelos, a
strong-willed millionaire who also owns the Orioles. The
handsome Venetian wallpaper is no more, an ugly acoustic
ceiling has been installed and the floor has been
overcleaned. 

But the thick broiled lamb chops with electric-green mint
jelly (a favorite of Mencken's and of my wife, Betsey) have
survived, at least until now, as has the fudgy chocolate
sundae so beloved by generations of well-bred Baltimoreans.


BRIGHT new places have sprung up, of course. One of the
first was Nancy Longo's Pierpoint, still the place to go
for modern versions of traditional Baltimore dishes and
innovative uses of prime Eastern Shore produce. Gotta try
her smoked crab cakes. Much more recently, the Red Maple, a
long, skinny room designed by someone just back from the
Milan Furniture Fair, has mesmerized the city's
noctambulist young. More a bar than a restaurant, it
nevertheless serves classy Asian "tapas" like duck egg
rolls and shrimp and tuna tartare. 

But the undisputed prince and princess of Baltimore
gastronomy at the moment are Tony Foreman and his wife,
Cindy Wolf. A grape nut and a buddy of Robert Parker, the
internationally influential critic, who lives not far from
here, Mr. Foreman oversees the couple's two restaurants,
Charleston, downtown, and Petit Louis Bistro in
semi-suburban Roland Park. Neither is Baltimore-specific;
Petit Louis features dishes like choucroute garni and
cassoulet, in Paris-level versions, and Charleston's long
menu owes as much to Maine, South Carolina and Louisiana as
to Maryland. 

"This is an in-between town," Mr. Foreman said over a
bottle or two of fine Châteauneuf-du-Pape. "Not Southern,
not Northern. People have a Northern edge and a Southern
graciousness. They care. If they dig it, they let you know;
if they don't, they let you know. That makes our job
easier." 

Ms. Wolf's crisp, light-as-air fried green tomatoes make a
splendid foil for her crab and lobster hash. Her shrimp
with grits, tasso and andouille take you to New Orleans in
an instant. Her lamb and pork and ultrafresh fish never
disappoint. And the cheeses, a dozen or more every night,
knowledgeably chosen and intelligently served, are enough
to make any restaurateur proud. 

Now why, you may be asking, especially if you grew up just
after World War II, why has he written all this without a
single word about Lady Baltimore cakes? Well, those
delectably rich confections, whose layers are separated by
fluffy, rosewater-scented white frosting studded with
chopped raisins, orange peel, figs and pecans, have little
or nothing to do with this city. 

The name originated in "Lady Baltimore," a 1906 novel by
Owen Wister about a young man who walks into a tearoom in a
Southern city, modeled on Charleston, S.C., to order a
wedding cake. What he chooses is a Lady Baltimore cake, no
doubt about that, but exactly why it is so named is
unclear. Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, founded
Maryland, but history records no link between his wife and
baked goods. Neither of them ever visited North America. 

My mother used to make Lady Baltimore cakes for family
festivities, and they are favorites of mine. I have never
come across one in a restaurant here, but Eddie's of Roland
Park, the city's premier fancy grocery, makes a dandy one
on special order. 


http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/19/dining/19BALT.html?ex=1046683918&ei=1&en=d9d30857d11470bb



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