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Like most estuaries, the Chesapeake Bay varies greatly in salinity levels from season to season and year to year. Rainstorms and snowmelt in the spring can make the water fresher or, as locals sometimes say, sweeter; droughts and hot spells in the summer can make the water saltier. A dry year can cause slower river flows and more sea nettles during your afternoon swim; heavier rains in other years might lead to an oyster die-off and push crabs farther south. The technical word for this kind of water—saltier than fresh, fresher than salt—is brackish. And there’s a technical definition as well: any water with between half a gram and thirty grams of salt per litre.
I’ve never really consulted a doctor about this, but it’s my sense that this is roughly the salinity level of the blood of any given Marylander as well. That’s because of our exceptionally liberal use of the regionally beloved substance known as Old Bay. It’s a spice-and-herb mix that’s super salty and oh, so slightly sweet, a perfect culinary simulation of late summer and early fall—not too hot, with the hint of a breeze. Appearance-wise, it has the deep brick red of Southern roads and flecks of gold like grains of sand. Like sand, too, it has a habit of getting everywhere—on hands, trousers, tables, chins, and, of course, every food you can imagine.
For eighty years and counting, Marylanders have put Old Bay on blue crabs and other seafood, such as rockfish and shrimp and oysters and scallops, but also on chicken, chili, corn on the cob, coleslaw, French fries, scrambled eggs, egg salad, guacamole, pasta, popcorn, mashed potatoes, potato chips, pickles, macaroni and cheese, hummus, carrots, and ice cream—to say nothing of bumper stickers, boxer shorts, socks, beach towels, baseball hats, dog collars, koozies, Christmas cards, and babies. My own daughter sported an Old Bay onesie—with her birth weight substituted for the net weight—about two days after being sent home from the hospital. I’ve seen other Old Bay couture, including T-shirts that say “I Put Old Bay on My Old Bay.” Regardless of what you’re wearing, if you’re having a bad day or a celebration, you can grab an Old Bay beer, down some Old Bay vodka, or mix up any one of the cocktails that call for the seasoning. All in all, there’s virtually nothing to which Marylanders won’t add “East Coast Glitter.”
This is, of course, because Old Bay is the greatest condiment in America. I can hear your first objection: that it isn’t a condiment. But etymology, like good taste, is on my side, with “condiment” squeezing out of the tube labelled “Latin” and glopping into English from the noun for spice, seasoning, or sauce. At its core, “condiment” means to put or place together, which is what I believe Old Bay could do, in these trying times, for our divided nation. If you do not already know Old Bay’s bipartisan power, then consider this: a few years ago, Goucher College, in Towson, included a question about the condiment on one of its renowned political polls and found that Marylanders, regardless of their position on the governor or the minimum wage, loved the seasoning. “Opinions toward Old Bay,” the study director said, “transcend party, age, race, gender, and ideological lines.”
Your second objection about Old Bay’s greatness is probably on behalf of some other, allegedly superior condiment. This is equally misguided. Mayonnaise is not so much enduring as outdated; generations of cardiologists have ruined the taste of it with all their talk of HDLs and LDLs. Ketchup is truly good only for children and French fries. I’m a fan of sriracha, but it’s too hot for easily half the population. Ranch dressing probably should never have left the Hidden Valley and certainly should never have left the salad. Salsa requires refrigeration, and comeback sauce can’t make it past the T.S.A. And what is mustard, exactly? Something neon yellow for slathering on hot dogs, or a pebbly brown substance to smear on your charcuterie board?
Even setting taste, versatility, and consistency aside, Old Bay has something these other condiments don’t, which is an incomparably American origin story—one that elevates it from being a great American condiment to a condiment that can make you feel great about America.
Gustav Brunngasser wasn’t born anywhere near the Chesapeake Bay, and he didn’t meet a blue crab until he was almost fifty years old. A Jewish businessman who would later shorten his name to Brunn, he was born in Bastheim, a small town in Bavaria, in 1893. Brunn attended school until he was thirteen, when his family could no longer afford tuition. He became an apprentice at a tannery and, after saving up money by selling skins and hides to a wholesaler in Wertheim-am-Main, he bought that business, an older company that specialized in rawhide and furs but had a sideline of spices. By the end of the First World War, spices had proved to be the more lucrative and less laborious side of the business, and along with pure spices Brunn was selling seasoning mixes he blended and packaged himself.
But Brunn’s success collided with the rise of the Nazi Party, and soon enough his two children were being targeted by some teachers and fellow-students, his Gentile bookkeeper quit, and more and more customers stopped buying “Jewish” spices. In an oral history collected and archived by the Jewish Museum of Maryland, Brunn’s wife, Bianca, remembered how one day all the stores in Wertheim-am-Main had signs in the windows saying “Jews Not Wanted Here.” Hoping that they would be better off in a bigger city with a larger Jewish community, the Brunns moved to Frankfurt, in 1935. But antisemitism was spreading everywhere, and not even removing the labels from his spices allowed the merchant to circumvent the commerce laws restricting the purchase of Jewish goods. By 1937, recognizing that both their livelihoods and their lives were in danger, Brunn contacted a relative living in Baltimore, applied for a visa, and prepared to leave for the United States.
Before the Brunns could depart, though, Jews around Germany were targeted during the November pogroms, culminating in Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, when their homes, businesses, and synagogues were savagely attacked by the Sturmabteilung, the S.S., Hitler Youth, and civilians who followed their violent lead. Around a hundred Jews were killed and thousands of Jewish properties were destroyed. In an interview with the Baltimore Jewish Times, Brunn’s son, Ralph, remembered how the family survived. “Fortunately for us, they made a mistake,” he said. “We were living in Frankfurt in an apartment on the second floor. They picked the wrong house—there weren’t any Jews living there.” The Brunns’ good luck didn’t last for very long. When Gustav attempted to comply with a new order requiring Jews to forfeit any firearms, and went to the police station to turn over his hunting rifles, he was detained. Later that night, he was taken by cattle car to Buchenwald.
But Brunn’s wife had heard that there might be a way to get him out. “There was a lawyer in Frankfurt known to the Jewish community,” their son remembered, a man who required “five thousand marks at the beginning and five thousand marks once ‘the merchandise’ was received. If the second five thousand marks wasn’t received, ‘the merchandise’ went right back where it came from.” After sixteen days in the concentration camp, and within a week of Bianca’s providing the funds, Brunn was reunited with his family, and together they fled the country. They weren’t able to bring much of anything with them to America, but Gustav did tuck a small spice mill into their luggage.
The Brunns came through New York City, but made their way south to Baltimore, where they moved their mill and two teen-agers—Ralph and their daughter, Lore—into an apartment on Eutaw Place. Gustav quickly took a job with Wolf Salganik, a Jewish man who ran a butcher shop, delicatessen, and meat-processing plant on Lombard Street. Brunn wanted to get back into the spice industry, though, and he found an opportunity to work with one of the city’s largest spice companies, McCormick. Brunn remembered being there only a few days before being told that his English was too poor. After McCormick fired him, he decided to work for himself again, and opened a spice shop on the second floor of a building on Market Place near the city’s fishmongers and seafood companies.
The Baltimore Spice Company was a grand name for an operation with no employees save Bianca and Gustav and sometimes Ralph, who were still hand-mixing whatever they sold. Brunn went door to door on Lombard Street trying to sell pickling spices and black pepper to delicatessen owners, then slowly broke into the meatpacking and pickle-making markets. He often worked from five in the morning until ten at night. Mostly Brunn had to look for customers, but eventually some of them came looking for him. Seafood dealers would pick from his various packets, trying to assemble just the right mix of pepper, mustard powder, and salt for their bushels of steamed crabs. “I thought if I was a spice-and-seasoning man, then I should be able to make a better seasoning for the seafood people,” Brunn said later, “so I began experimenting.”
As soon as Brunn thought he’d perfected his recipe, he had to alter it. In 1938, the United States had passed the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which required that every processed or packaged food be sold with a label containing the name of the product, its net weight, the name and address of the manufacturer, and, in some cases, such as seasonings, the full list of ingredients. So, along with red and black pepper, celery salt, and paprika, Brunn added fifteen other spices and herbs, hoping that the blend would be impossible for competitors to steal. “To his amazement,” Ralph said later, “those minor things he put in there—the most unlikely things, including cinnamon and nutmeg and cloves and all kinds of stuff that had nothing to do with crabs at all—gave a background bouquet that he couldn’t have anticipated.”
Brunn called it Delicious Brand Shrimp and Crab Seasoning. Then a friend who worked in advertising suggested the less generic and more regionally pleasing Old Bay, the nickname for a steamship operated by the Baltimore Steam Packet Company, which ran regularly between Baltimore and Norfolk, Virginia, carrying passengers and mail. As the Baltimore Spice Company grew, Brunn prided himself on hiring immigrants and refugees. “We’re a miniature United Nations,” he told the Baltimore Sun, bragging that some dozen languages were spoken on the floor of his factory.
Soon that factory was followed by six others, and, as decades passed, Brunn’s business boomed. He was still running it in his eighties, though no longer working seventeen-hour days. He died in 1985 and, five years later, McCormick & Company bought the Baltimore Spice Company, maintaining Old Bay’s name, original recipe, and iconic packaging. Although Old Bay is no longer family-owned, it’s still beloved by families; McCormick sells more than seventy-five million ounces of it every year, to say nothing of all the branded product lines, from Old Bay Goldfish to Old Bay hot sauce; its market now extends far beyond the mid-Atlantic.
Still, those of us who live in the region where Old Bay was born are its most steadfast champions. These days the tins are made of plastic, and you have to be very careful not to mistakenly buy the low-sodium variety. My grandmother lived long enough to delight in buying it in seven-and-a-half-pound jugs—too big to carry in her purse, but enough to get her through a summer crab-and-watermelon season. (Around the Eastern Shore, true connoisseurs sprinkle it liberally on any form of melon.) Like plenty of other old-timers, my grandmother had stories about shaking Old Bay into turtle soup or sprinkling it on muskrat and squirrel; I learned lately that Old Bay was once popular on raccoon and bear.
You can flip through family albums around here and, though the hair styles and lapel widths will change, the sweet-corn yellow, steamed-crab red, and deep bay blue of Old Bay tins never do. (True devotees will note that the bold clash of primary colors looks a little like something else we Marylanders love and plaster everywhere we can: our state flag.) Some of my earliest memories involve sitting with my sisters smearing the messy red specks of Old Bay like sand art on the long sheets of butcher paper that covered the tables at church and other community crab feasts. My father often made us lunch with just two ingredients: a can of tuna fish and a tin of Old Bay. If we were at home, he might spread the mixture between slices of bread; if he took us to work, he’d just pack a fork.
It’s hard to say whether I can still taste pure Old Bay or if it’s become adulterated with all those memories. Nostalgia is its own kind of spice, making everything brighter and sweeter. I know some watermen who prefer a different seafood seasoning, made by another Baltimore business, J.O. Spice Company, because it’s still family-owned. But as much as I value that, too, I admit there’s nothing I’d like more than for Old Bay to take over the world. Whatever my feelings about rampant consumerism, they are suspended when it comes to this particular condiment. By all means, put it everywhere. Variety isn’t the spice of life; Old Bay is. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
