Chowdah de Crab

Our weekend house is only beach-proximate, but it is close enough that careful readers of this space will know we have added The Beach House Cookbook by Mary Kay Andrews to the small collection of cookbooks in the galley at Whaling House. It is full of fun, flexible recipes -- some of them involving seafood.

We turned to this volume when we finally got around to inviting some friends over who live full-time near the same waterfront. Pamela found a suitably maritime recipe: crab chowder.

Followers of this space may also have noticed that we are somewhat finicky about all things crab. Being from Maryland, we are cautious when our national crustacean is prepared by non-Chesapeake folks, even if they are good with other seafood. But we would be in charge of this dish, and we would get our crab, if not from the Great Shellfish Bay itself, then at least from a trusted Maryland.

The location of the cookbook ends up being consequential -- we looked over the recipe and jotted down some ingredients but not others. The result was more than the usual number of substitutions. One of those was fortuitous -- I replaced all of the called-for chicken broth by doubling (OK, more than doubling) the half-and-half. And I don't regret that!

How I made this -- as executed, not exactly as written:

I heated some olive oil, and added some chopped up bacon. We had bacon ends rather than slices, so I coarsely chopped them. Once crisp -- after about eight minutes -- I added finely chopped onion, in lieu of shallots. I then added a bit more oil and a pound of tiny red potatoes, each quartered. I added a seafood seasoning mix and I sautéed these for about 5 more minutes before adding most of a bag of frozen corn (of course I would have used local corn a few weeks ago) and close to a quart of half-and-half.

I brought it to a simmer -- actually, I covered it and walked away at the wrong time. It boiled over. But it did not get overheated on the bottom, so I moved it to another burner and controlled the heat more carefully. I kept it on a low simmer for 30 minutes. 

Near the end, I added a full pound of Phillips lump crab meat (from Costco, rather than our local fish monger; again, it's a Maryland thing). I then added a tablespoon of flour I had whisked together with just a splash of reserved half-and-half. I also stirred in a glug of port (in lieu of sherry) and kept simmering until the crab was gently broken up and heated through, about 10 more minutes.

We served this with Pamela's famous skillet cornbread and a fruit salad. This all paired quite well with two different unoaked Chardonnays and was followed by a sweet, tannic punsch from Sweden.

This was not a meal made for photography; hence the iconic crab above rather than the chowder itself.