This Sunday is National Crabmeat Day — a nice reminder of how delicious crabs can be ahead of the warm summer season.
After a surprisingly cold winter, is there anything better than the idea of sitting at a picnic table with a pile of crabs and your favorite beverage?
To help get you in the mood, WTOP took a visit to the J.O. Spice factory in Halethorpe, just south of Baltimore, to talk about eating crabs with a family that’s been helping Marylanders do it for decades.
While there is one brand synonymous with seafood in the state of Maryland, Old Bay, and not many people from Maryland will bad mouth it, the lesser-know J.O. Spice is used in many Maryland crab houses.
Ginger Ports learned firsthand when she first met her now-husband, Don, while on a trip to Ocean City.
“When he asked me my name … I said, ‘Ginger,’ and he said, ‘Wow, you’re a spice.’ And he was like, ‘Do you like crabs?’ And I said, ‘Of course, I like crabs. My grandfather has a boat. My uncle’s an oysterman.’ He was like, ‘Well, then you’ve had my grandfather’s spice.’ And I said, ‘Your grandfather makes Old Bay?'” she joked.
He didn’t react too kindly to that.
“I thought his head was going to turn and spin — I mean, he was red,” she said with a laugh.
This year, the family Ginger Ports married into, the makers of J.O. Spice, is celebrating 80 years in business. Odds are, even if you don’t know much about it, you would recognize the taste on any crabs you have in the mid-Atlantic region.
“If you name a crab house that you go to, if it isn’t ‘J.O. No. 2,’ it is a custom blend that we make for them. So they could vary from crab house to crab house,” Ports said.
“We’re not a billion-dollar corporation, so we don’t have time to advertise,” she added. “You know it is J.O. on the crabs. We know it’s on the crabs.”
A whole lot of the spice blend is on the crabs, too.
J.O. Spice Company buys about a million pounds of salt for every crab season — so much salt, they need a crane to unload it into their warehouse.
What else goes into it after that? Even Ports isn’t entirely sure.
“The blend is proprietary, and so they don’t even tell me those things,” she said. “I know that there’s red pepper in it, and I know there’s paprika in it, and any good seafood seasoning is going to have ground mustard, because that’s what makes everything adhere to the seafood that you’re preparing.”
J.O. Spice No. 2 has more salt in it to help bind to the crabs. They also make a salt-free and reduced salt version of No. 1, which is the seafood seasoning they recommend for soups and crab cakes.
Every year, Ports is a snowbird in Florida, which gives her the chance to visit clients running seafood restaurants there. And like many around the D.C. area who have traveled, she gets leery when she sees a restaurant offering “Maryland style” crab cakes.
In fact, she calls that a dead giveaway that whatever they’re offering, it’s not done the right way.
But for fun, she’ll mention she is from Maryland and works in the seafood industry.
“I’ve never had anyone tell me to order it,” she said. “They’re like, ‘OK, you might want to order something else.’ Because peppers and sauces all over crab cakes — that is not Maryland style. In Maryland, we don’t say ‘Maryland style’ crab cake on the menu. We just have jumbo lump crab cakes, or crab cakes, because not all of the crab cakes are jumbo lump.”
And speaking of crab cakes, her advice is keep it simple: A half cup of mayo for every pound of crabmeat.
Her family’s mix includes some cracker meal to help bind everything together. She makes sure to refrigerate the crab cakes so they can firm up a bit and don’t fall apart as they cook.
And if you’re using jumbo lump to make your crab cakes, she advises you mix tenderly so the lumps stay in form.
“You’re not squishing it all up, you’re just gently folding it in to get that crab cake,” she said.
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