To make great soft-shell crabs on the grill, combine melted butter, salt, pepper, and Tobasco sauce. Brush that mixture on the crabs and put them on a medium-high grill for five to six minutes.
That’s the official word from North Carolina Sea Grant’s Mariner’s Menu, which has been collecting, developing, and testing local seafood recipes for home cooks for almost 50 years.
Not a soft-shell crab person? What about trigger fish cream soup or sauteed sea bass with lemon-tarragon sauce? How about fresh grilled North Carolina tuna with herb butter?
Check out the Mariner's Menu recipe collection here.
Since the coronavirus pandemic hit, traffic to the Mariner’s Menu website has exploded with people stuck at home and trying new recipes. Online traffic to the recipe collection is up almost 85% since the beginning of the pandemic, according to Barry Nash with N.C. Sea Grant in Morehead City.
Most local seafood in North Carolina and around the country was being sold to restaurants, but the pandemic shut down a lot of that business for commercial fishing operations. Nash says the uptick in visits to the site shows how people are trying to learn how to cook seafood at home.
"Many people are not quite sure how to handle and cook fish and worry about overcooking it," Nash explains.
Some of the most popular features on the site give the basics on how to pick, handle, and store fresh seafood, what fish is in season when, and a post explaining the different types of shrimp caught off North Carolina.
The most popular recipes on the site are for pan-fried mackerel and for wahoo, according to Sea Grant spokeswoman Katie Mosher.
The other most popular recipes on the site are for soft-shell crabs, smoked fish dip, tuna, sea bass, and striped bass.
The idea for Mariner’s Menu came from Joyce Taylor, who worked with N.C. Sea Grant for 30 years as a consumer seafood specialist. N.C. Sea Grant is a federal-state partnership based at N.C. State University.
She worked with a now-defunct group in Carteret County called the Nutrition Leaders.
“They all lived in Carteret County and they all grew up eating seafood, so they all knew what good seafood should be like,” Nash says. “All of these have been developed with North Carolina species.”
Starting in 1973, the group would meet once a month to test and refine the recipes, scoring them on a five-point scale. The recipes that got a four or a five were published in a newsletter called Mariner’s Menu.
In 2003, a collection of the recipes were published in a book called Mariner’s Menu: 30 Years of Fresh Seafood Ideas.
After Taylor retired, she went back to work with N.C. Sea Grant to develop another 150 recipes to publish online. Taylor died in 2013 at 81.
Vanda Lewis picked up the baton for Mariner’s Menu about a year ago to continue testing and writing up the recipes, this time with new photographs of the finished dishes.
“It's hard to pick a favorite,” Lewis says in an email, sharing a recipe for stuffed clams.
The stuffed claims involve a mix of chopped clams, onion, green pepper, celery, cracker crumbs, and seasoning baked at 450 degrees in open clam shells.
She’s been posting a new recipe each week. Mosher says they are testing and posting new seasonal recipes for seafood coming out of North Carolina waters, including branching out into less traditional dishes for the state like Southwest striped bass with black bean salsa, Asian fried oysters, Tex-Mex shrimp, and striped bass tacos.
“The commercial fishing industry is a deep part of North Carolina heritage and food culture,” says Liz Biro, director of N.C. Catch, an organization that promotes North Carolina seafood.
“Everybody loves fresh seafood, everybody loves fresh fish, everybody loves the idea of going down to the local fish market. It’s almost like when you go down to the local farmers’ market; you go, you buy, then you get home and kind of scratch your head, ‘Gosh, what do I do with this?',” Biro says.
That’s where the Mariner’s Menu comes in.