Crab Shalou

As we walked down the road to Miss Charlotte’s dock, we took the old dirt path that Mama had taken as a little girl—and Granny had taken before her.

As we reached the weathered boards of the slightly leaning dock, we could see the current beginning to head upriver.

Mama unrolled two lengths of twine about eight feet long. One was for me. The other one for her.

She tightly tied a piece of chicken to the end of my string.

“Dennis, start looking around the pilings and see if you see any crabs.”

“I see one, Mama,” I shouted with excitement. “Hurry up, I want to get him.”

“Take your string and piece of chicken and carefully drop it into the water, away from the crab—you don’t want to scare him. Slowly drag the piece of chicken closer to him, but stop before you’re too close. He’ll begin to smell it.”

“He’s tugging on it, Mama. Get the net.”

Mama, trying to tie a piece of chicken to her string, put it down and lowered the dip net into the water.

She moved slowly toward the crab, trying not to make much motion or cast any shadows.

I could barely see the crab through the dark tannin-stained water. With a swift motion of her wrist, the crab was in the net.

“You got him, Denny.”

“Hurry up and go dip the bucket into the water and fill it about half full. We want to keep them alive until we get home and can freeze them.”

That day we netted about 13 crabs, well on our way to the four or so dozen that we’d need for our feast.

“Mama, what if we don’t get enough by Sunday to have Shalou?”

“Well,” she thought for a moment, “we’ll have Granny call down to Wayne’s and buy a few dozen to go with what we’ve caught.”

As we stepped through the screen door onto Grandma Murphy’s back porch, she was standing in the open doorway to the kitchen.

“How many did you get?” she asked, smiling with anticipation.

“Thirteen, Grandma. Big ones too!”

“Well, I’m proud to have them—now, let’s get them cleaned and in the freezer.”

“Can I help?”

“You can break the claws and legs off, but be careful. You don’t want one to get hold of you.”

“I’ll open the backs. You’ve got to be careful to remove all the devil’s fingers.” She was pointing to a funny finger-like covering over the crab’s insides. “They say they are poisonous.”

By Saturday, we were short about two dozen crabs. Granny called Wayne, her cousin, and arranged the last of what we needed for our long-awaited meal.

Early Sunday morning, we met at Grandma’s house to begin the cooking process, which was lengthy—at least it seemed that way at the time.

Not because it was a complex meal—rather, as Grandma and Mama explained, “You can’t rush Crab Shalou. It’s got to cook low and slow to develop the flavors. The crab flavor has to penetrate the tomato sauce and the sauce has to seep into the pieces of crab.”

“Gaynell, go out on the back porch and get down the big enamel canning pot. With five dozen crabs, we’ll need it.”

As Grandma washed out the old pot, Mama began cutting up the vegetables. She peeled the onions, sliced the bell peppers lengthwise, then, with a small but sharp paring knife, sliced them, using her opposing thumb as her cutting board.

“Honey, we’ll need four or five big cloves of garlic. If they’re small, use the entire head,” she said.

“Dennis, look on the dining room table and bring me those No. 10 cans of whole tomatoes,” Grandma said sweetly, adding, “They’re heavy, so bring in one at a time and watch your tootsies.”

Grandma wiped the lids off, then drove her big butcher knife into the lid and started working it up and down at an angle in slow, smooth motions, following the raised rim.

“Grandma,” Mama said with a slightly raised voice, her eyebrows raised like Uncle Don’s, “you’re going to cut yourself wide open. Use your new can opener.”

“Honey, I’ve opened cans like this all my life. I can have it opened before I can dig that contraption out of the cabinet,” Grandma protested.

“See, I’m already done.”

“Denny, grab me two sticks of butter out of the icebox, pretty please.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Soon, the smell of butter, onion, bell pepper, and garlic penetrated the air.

“Wash your hands, honey. Grandma is going to put these tomatoes in a big bowl and you can use your hands and fingers to mash them up for me.”

“Oh, goodie,” I said, overjoyed to be part of the process and under Grandma’s apron strings.

Once the sauce was assembled, the old canning pot was a little better than half full.

“Now, let’s let this simmer on low for the next hour or so. Then we’ll add the crabs and let it go for another good while.”

“I’ve got to sit down. I’m about past going,” she muttered as she pitched herself up on the old wooden stool, placed in front of the stove, ready to hold vigil.

It’s the place I most remember seeing Grandma Murphy, perched on that old stool, one foot on the floor, the other on the bottom rung—at her kitchen counter or in front of that old stove.

Minutes later, Grandma pointed her spoon toward the dining room window, saying, “Looky there who has just pulled in.”

I ran to the window, pulled back the lace curtain, and hollered, “It’s Uncle Glenn and Aunt Lizard.”

Aunt Liz entered the house first with a bowl filled with something creamy-looking.

“What have you got there, Liz?” Grandma asked.

“It’s a banana pudding, Mrs. Murphy.”

“It sure looks good.”

“I hope so. It’s a new recipe. It’s got Eagle Brand condensed milk in it.”

Mama chimed in, “Well, it’s got to be good then!”

Mama and Granny loved anything with condensed milk … even on plain old white bread!

Soon, we heard Granny at the back door.

“Can someone open the door for me? I’m loaded down.”

She was cradling two gallon jars of sweet tea in her arms.

She heaved them up on the kitchen countertop, saying, “It sure smells good in here.”

About that time, Uncle Don pulled up and my cousins jumped out of the bed of the truck and, with the help of my uncle, lowered down a big ice chest.

Aunt Laurie, with her hands full, had a loaf of La Segunda Cuban bread tucked under each arm.

“Luewanza, go out to the front porch. I’ve got a bunch of old Tampa Tribunes stacked up in the corner. Give some to Dennis so he can go cover the table that the boys moved out there under the jacaranda tree,” Grandma said.

She continued, “Well, if everyone is here, we can put the spaghetti on to cook. Laurie, do you mind cutting up the bread, buttering it so we can toast it?”

She was running her kitchen the same way she had run the school lunchroom for twenty-seven years.

“Don, you can take this pot of crabs out to the table. Leave the lid on it—we don’t want anything else in the pot except what I put in it.”

“Glenn, once I take up these spaghetti noodles, you can take them out to the table.”

“Liz, will you check on the bread?”

“Gaynell, get the plates and silverware ready—don’t forget the roll of paper towels.”

“Luewanza, do we have enough glasses?”

“Did someone put the nutcrackers and picks on the table—do we have plenty?”

Grandma had everyone running around like chickens with their heads cut off.

Following everyone out the back door, the moment we’d all waited an entire year for had arrived.

Grandma declared simply, “I don’t know about y’all, but I’m hungry. Let’s sit down and eat.”

We’d all started digging in when Grandma spoke up, with a chuckle.

“Ain’t someone going to ask the blessing?”

A collective “Yes, ma’am” murmured across the table.

“God is good. God is great. Thank you for this food. Amen.”

“Dennis, you want me to make your plate?” Mama asked.

First, a generous layer of spaghetti.

Then, a ladle of thick sauce.

Next came the crabs, a mixture of claws and body halves.

Taking up the plate rim was a piece of perfectly toasted Cuban bread.

“Do you want some of Grandma’s tomato and cucumber salad with onions? It’s good.”

“Yes, ma’am, but no onions.”

With about a dozen people around the table, helping their plates, passing bread and the salad bowl, it was a noisy affair.

I could overhear Aunt Laurie explaining to my younger cousins how to eat.

“Donnie, I’ll help you and Aaron crack and pick the crab meat. But the idear is you have a bite of your spaghetti with sauce. Pick on the crabs and eat some meat. Take the Cuban bread and sop up the juice.”

“You see, the noodles and bread help keep the hunger away while you’re picking the crabs.”

“That’s a lot of work for lunch,” Donnie said.

“Yeah it is, Donnie,” Uncle Don said with an affectionate smile, “but it’s worth it.”

Once everyone’s plates were full, a quietness overtook the table. Well, kind of. Few words were uttered other than, “Exactly how I remember it,” and, “Why do we do this only once a year?”

One by one, we’d pick up a piece of crab and place it in our mouths, sucking the sauce and juice from them before we began picking the meat.

The juice caught in the body chambers would often escape, sending streams running down our arms until they dripped off our elbows onto the newspaper-covered table.

The cracking of the shells, the slurping of the sauce, and the groans of satisfaction were what lingered around the table.

“Damn, if someone came around and couldn’t see us and only heard us, they’d think we were doing something vulgar,” Granny exclaimed.

By each plate, crab shells began to pile up. The bowls placed at each end of the table for this purpose were overflowing.

“Gaynell, pass me another piece of bread, please,” someone asked.

Uncle Don stood up and dipped a few more crabs onto his plate.

Uncle Glenn did the same.

Aunt Liz, slightly pushing back from the table, exclaimed, “I’m stuffed. I can’t eat another bite.”

“Don’t fill up,” Grandma warned. “Liz made a new kind of banana pudding with condensed milk in it and I made a lemon meringue pie. It’s in the icebox, good and cold.”

Mama, Uncle Don, and Uncle Glenn, all sugar fiends in their own right, answered at the same time, “Grandma, we’ve never been so full that we couldn’t eat a piece of your pie and a scoop of banana pudding.”

As the last of the shells hit the table, the better part of two hours had passed.

One by one, we got up from the table.

Someone pulled the old galvanized trash can over to the table.

Another took the plates inside.

The crab shells were dumped into a five-gallon bucket and would either be thrown back into the river or buried—turned into fertilizer.

Grandma, smiling and joyous at having had the family around the table on this fine Sunday, declared, “Well, that was good, about as good as it’s ever been, but I can’t wait until next year when we do it again.”

Author’s note: Years later, I learned that Crab Shalou was our family’s name for the Cuban dish enchilado de cangrejo, or enchilado de jaiba. Spoken in the Cuban cadence I grew up hearing around Tampa, enchilado could sound something like “Shalou” to our Cracker ears. Somewhere along the way, that’s what we began calling it—pronounced “Sha-L-owl,” with owl at the end—and in our family, the name stuck.