LET THEM EAT CRAB CAKES

After more than a century, the fifth-generation Faidley’s Seafood lives on as the king (and queen) of Maryland’s most iconic dish.

- MIKE UNGER

BEFORE THE MAGIC HAPPENS, Nancy Faidley Devine puts on plastic gloves to protect her rings and immaculate pink fingernails. Next, she dons a thin plastic apron, above which she ties one of a more substantial white cloth. The two layers of protection are necessary because the secret sauce can stain.

Into a large bowl, she dumps one pound of lump crab meat—always from Maryland when it’s in season—then a pre-measured bag of saltine crackers that have been broken into dime-sized pieces by one of her employees. They can’t be too small, because she doesn’t want crumbs clinging to the meat, but if she spots one that’s too big, she snaps it in half. She sprinkles a dash of Old Bay—not too much, lest the mixture become too salty—and some dry mustard, then adds three ladles of that sauce from a four-gallon bucket.

From her perch in the corner near the front doors, about three feet above the weathered floor that slopes from Paca Street toward Eutaw, Devine begins hand-mixing the ingredients that she forms into what many people believe are the best crab cakes in America’s crab cake capital.

She takes great pain not to knead the meat or treat it too roughly so those magnificent lumps don’t break apart. Instead, she slowly burrows her fingers into the pile, then gently folds.

“I watch people put crab meat in a bowl and take a spoon or fork to it,” she says, bewildered. “I think, ‘Oh my god, they’re messing this up.’ You buy something that’s premium like this and then you take a fork to it?”