North Carolina's Crab Cuisine by Ruth Paget

North Carolina’s Crab Cuisine by Ruth Paget 

I felt part of North Carolina’s Outer Banks beach culture every time my family went to oceanfront restaurants about one mile from the North Carolina border in Virginia Beach (Virginia) for boiled crab and buttery, seared scallops and shrimp. 

Some of these restaurants even had boat drive-up windows for take-out orders. 

Laurent and Florence always ordered buckets of boiled crab while I would get seafood platters of buttery, seared scallops and shrimp. Laurent and I always drank a California chardonnay with our meal like reliably good Kendall-Jackson. 

My mom job was to crack crab claws for Florence, so she could dunk them still warm in melted butter. She would say her crab were getting cold when I took breaks to eat my scallops and shrimp. 

We chair danced to the tunes of Jimmy Buffet and Hootie and the Blowfish and ate key lime pie for dessert for me, ice cream for Florence, and coffee for trim sailor Laurent. 

Seafood and crab, in particular, define the cuisine of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. You could buy freshly cooked lump crabmeat in supermarkets in Virginia Beach to use in omelets and appetizers as well as ready-made deli dishes using seafood at Harris-Teeter and Hanaford supermarkets. 

I made many dishes at home to save money. It was easy to do, because I had access to relatively inexpensive ingredients and recipes in the Virginian-Pilot newspaper. Many of the recipes I used are similar to the ones in Outer Banks Cookbook: Recipes and Traditions from North Carolina’s Barrier Islands by Elizabeth Wiegand. Some of my favorite recipes in this cookbook include: 

-spicy toasted pecans – Pecans grow in North Carolina’s sandy soil. They are a favorite with libations like Hurricane cocktails and margaritas. 

-Figs with Gorgonzola cheese and walnuts – Figs also grow in North Carolina. You place a walnut in the center of a fig half in this recipe and top it with Gorgonzola cheese before running it under it under the broiler for a few minutes.

-figs with country ham and green salad 

-artichoke and crab dip 

-crabmeat pâté 

-shrimp bisque 

-crabmeat omelet 

-seared scallops 

-scallops and scallions on polenta medallions 

-shrimp boiled in beer 

-warm shrimp pasta salad with goat cheese 

-chilled pickled shrimp 

-creamy she crab soup – there are canned versions of this soup that are also very good like Chincoteague She Crab Soup

-French Market Flounder (Marseilles-style) – dredge flounder in seasoned flour and then egg. Brown the fish. Add white wine to the pan and top fish with a tomato slice and cheese and run the pan under the broiler for several minutes. Serve with white rice that you mix with pan juices. Super easy and delicious recipe. 

Seafood lovers will find many reasons to love Outer Banks Cookbook: Recipes and Traditions from North Carolina’s Barrier Islands by Elizabeth Wiegand. 

By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting the North Carolina Outer Banks by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting the North Carolina Outer Banks by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

When my husband Laurent went on a business trip to Virginia, I went along with him to see some new sites in our old home.

We wanted to visit the Outer Banks in North Carolina and headed south through the Great Dismal Swamp that is located in both Virginia and North Carolina.  This place is creepy.  The road is built above the soil, which is flooded with water and surrounds tree roots.  Mosquitos like to call the Great Dismal Swamp home.

We drove across low-lying bridges above ocean water in rain to arrive on the island where Manteo is located.  They have an upscale Harris-Teeter grocery store where you can buy raw (fresh) oysters, dry white wines to go with the oysters, banana-cream pies, and chocolate covered coffee beans to munch on.

In Manteo, they also had drive-thru liquor stores all along the beachfront.  Manteo is the main town for excursions to the outlying islands, which you get to by driving over mile-long bridges that lie low over the ocean water.

We drove over more low-lying bridges in the rain.  I was becoming concerned about the rising ocean water around us, but the bridges were not flooding, so we continued onward.
Once on Roanoke Island, we drove around Dare County.  The Carolina-Algonquian people inhabited this area in the 16^th century.

The English under Sir Walter Raleigh founded Roanoke Colony in this area in 1585.  Governor White of the Roanoke County left the 120 colonists in 1587 to get supplies in England according to the website for North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

When Governor White returned in 1590, the colony had vanished.  The only thing left of the colony was a carving on a tree that said, “Croatoan.”

From Roanoke, we drove over more low-lying bridges to arrive at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.  From Kitty Hawk, we had to drive to Kill Devil Hills to see the Wright Brothers National Monument, which details aviation history.

The two brothers, who manned the “first controlled powered airplane flights” at Kill Devil Hills, were Oroville and Wilbur Wright.  The brothers were engineers from Ohio.

After we finished visiting the aviation museum, we drove home over the low-lying bridges in more pouring rain.

We drove around some of the beachfront house suburbs and drove back to Norfolk, Virginia through the Great Dismal Swamp for chicken mole as I thought of reading some Edgar Allen Poe stories in this creepy, dank, and fungus-prone world.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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