On a recent foggy Saturday in Santa Rosa, about 40 men and women stood before a dozen wood tables, their yellow jackets bright against the gray sky. Before them lay giant mounds of cooked Dungeness crab that had been spilled out of cardboard boxes and poured into wet, briny heaps.
Wooden mallets rose and fell as the crew cracked their way through the piles of claws, legs and fist-sized bodies, the splintering thwack of wood against calcified shell releasing the smell of sea salt and ocean tide.
In two hours, they demolished more than 1,900 pounds of crab, which was washed clean in an oversized metal trough. It was then packed into plastic totes and driven to an event hall in nearby Sebastopol where it would be marinated in garlic and parsley, or bathed in a soupy tomato broth, and served to 400 eager guests at an all-you-can-eat affair.
Since 1961, employees and alumni of the Sonoma-Lake-Napa unit of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, have held an annual Forestry Crab Feed to raise funds for local charities and scholarships for employees and their families.
This year was no different. Patrons paid $100 to tuck in elbow-to-elbow at communal tables, bibs cinched around their necks, as they used their fingers and metal picks to pry chunks of meat from claws and legs. The only thing louder than the blue grass band in the hall, or the Technicolor crab buckets hand-decorated by schoolchildren, was the convivial banter that swelled from tables to rafters.
Northern California’s commercial Dungeness crab season opened Jan. 5, marking the unofficial start of the crab feed season, a culinary tradition that extends from January to March. Hundreds of churches, social clubs, civic groups and nonprofits from central California to the Oregon border promote their dinners on Eventbrite, Facebook and in local newspapers and magazines.
Crab feeds go back more than a century, but they gained popularity in the 1960s when Portuguese social clubs began hosting elaborate dinners to raise money to fund religious festivities. Nowadays, enthusiasts rank crab feeds on Yelp. They are debated on Reddit.
Devon Weston, a nurse from San Francisco, scoured several websites before landing on the firefighters’ event. She was so excited that she brought three guests. “I’ve been waiting for this all week!” she said.
Indeed crab feeds are so popular, the firefighters’ dinner was one of six in Sonoma County that night, including the 36th annual Great Sonoma Crab and Wine Fest held at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds and attended by 1,250 guests. Billed as one of the state’s largest crab feeds, attendees consumed 3,750 pounds of crab, according to organizers.
Crab feeds, though, are more than moneymaking ventures to finance charities and school scholarships, or to fund operations. They are a rare opportunity in today’s wired world for friends, family and strangers to sit across the table, share a meal and talk.
Crabby fingers, guests quickly learn, aren’t compatible with cellphones. For many people, like Mercedes Shideler, whose husband helped organize the first Forestry Crab Feed in 1961 and who attended the Sebastopol dinner with her daughter, crab feeds are an opportunity to catch up with old friends. They are also a welcome respite in these politically divided times.
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, or whatever your feelings are,” said Mike Sabella, who shared cooking duties with his son at the St. Philip School crab feed in the Noe Valley neighborhood of San Francisco. “All you’re after is that crab that’s on the table.”
Dungeness crab, which is larger than Atlantic blue crab, has not always held the exalted place on diners’ plates it does today. In the 1850s, as fortune seekers poured into San Francisco at the height of the Gold Rush, crabs were foraged from the bay with traps made from old barrel hoops and twine, said Paul Stangl, author of the upcoming book, “San Francisco Seafood: From Ocean to Table.”
“They would collect them, carry them in sacks and sell them to saloons,” Stangl said.
Organized crab fishing emerged in the late 1800s, and as the industry flourished, fishermen, many of them immigrants, ventured beyond the Bay. By the early 1900s, Stangl said, motorized boats allowed crabbers to travel even farther out to sea, where crabs were larger, meatier and plentiful.
In recent years, Northern California’s crab season has been delayed because of unhealthy levels of domoic acid, a toxin that can accumulate in crabs during algae blooms and which can be fatal if ingested by humans. Migrating whales risk becoming entangled in commercial crab fishing gear, although state authorities recently approved the use of less harmful alternatives. Because of this, crabs for the feeds can come from as far away as northern Washington, or even parts of Alaska, if local crustaceans are hard to find.
The earliest mention of a crab feed in the San Francisco Chronicle was a gathering of the Twelfth Ward Democratic Club in June 1871, according to the newspaper. By the 1930s, sports groups and social clubs promoted dinners in newspapers farther afield. But it was California’s Portuguese community three decades later that popularized the version most people know today.
According to Deolinda Adão, the former executive director of the Portuguese Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley, immigrants who arrived from the Azores in the 1960s hosted festive crab feeds to attract crowds so they could fund the annual Holy Ghost Festivals they celebrated back home.
Such festivals, which celebrate Queen Isabel of Portugal, have long been central to Portuguese culture worldwide. Many Catholics believe the Queen, who died in 1336 and was canonized in 1625, successfully implored the Holy Spirit to end a famine and also distributed food from her own stores to the poor. Adão said the new immigrants used the money they earned from crab feeds to honor the queen with a parade and by serving a traditional meal of bread, beef and broth to the community.
Most crab feeds reflect the taste of their organizers. The menu for the Forestry Crab Feed is always the same — marinated cracked Dungeness crab, cioppino, shrimp salad and garlic bread — with recipes handed down for decades and protected in a white binder. The first crab feed 65 years ago was a dinner for about 20 people. But as word-of-mouth spread, the firefighters began selling tickets, said Kim Thompson, a retired battalion chief who oversees the annual feed.
At the Crab and Wine Fest organized by the Sonoma County Farm Bureau, dairies, banks, wineries and construction companies commanded prime tables. After the plates were cleared, attendees bid in a live auction bid on a Jamaican vacation, wine tastings and a visit for six to a private gun range followed by dinner. (The last one went for $5,500, said Dayna Ghirardelli, the bureau’s executive director.) Proceeds from the evening were earmarked for agriculture education, scholarships and farm bureau programs.
The festivities at St. Philip School had a decidedly Italian flair. Red, green and white balloons — the colors of Italy’s flag — floated above a table in the school’s dining hall. The kitchen was buzzing after 600 pounds of cracked, cooked and cleaned crab was delivered for that night’s dinner. A fragrant mélange of onions, garlic and canned tomatoes simmered on the stove for rigatoni.
Compared with the Farm Bureau extravaganza, where one sponsor paid $10,000 for a table, the St. Philip crab feed felt homey. Kelly Sabella, a teacher’s aide who oversaw the dinner, was keeping everything on track. She enlisted her husband, Nick, a firefighter whose ancestors immigrated from Sicily in late 1800s, to cook the main dishes. Nick bought the groceries, while Kelly said she managed three shifts of parent volunteers. She arranged for seventh and eighth graders to serve and clear tables. At the end of the night, $2,000 in tips was collected, which Kelly said would be used to help pay for a student trip to New York City.
The whole afternoon was a jovial parade of cousins, parents and neighborhood friends wandering in and out of the kitchen. Nick’s father, Mike, a restaurateur and chef and a fourth-generation San Franciscan, fussed over the pasta sauce, leaving Nick to focus on the crab.
“If I didn’t have the people who had done it before me to lean on, then I think I probably would be a little more stressed,” Nick said.
Italian cooking is second nature among the Sabellas. In 1920, Antonino Sabella, Michael’s grandfather and Nick’s great-grandfather, opened A. Sabella Fish Market on Fisherman’s Wharf, a crab shack that sold clams, oysters, crab and fish to grocers and restaurants, according to the 2006 book, “San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf.” Over time, the shack evolved into a restaurant, where Mike Sabella was executive chef in the ’80s and ’90s. But like many stalwarts that fueled Fisherman’s Wharf’s early culinary preeminence, the restaurant closed, in 2007.
Despite that, memories endure. Mike self-published a book in 2021 about his family’s history that included old recipes. “It was a bestseller amongst, like, family and friends,” he said with a laugh. Mostly, he said, he wanted to celebrate a time when food, family and community were indistinguishable.
Mike looked at his cooking partner, Nick, who was chopping herbs.
“I’m sorry, it’s not about me,” he said. “This whole thing is about crab.”
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