Crab Stuffed Mushrooms

Use real lump crab meat, not imitation. Gently fold the filling to preserve crab chunks. Pick through crab carefully for shell fragments. The mushrooms will release liquid as they bake - the parchment catches it. Serve hot for best texture. These pair beautifully with champagne.

Crab-stuffed mushrooms are a mid-20th-century American holiday appetizer that combines two classic Chesapeake Bay ingredients — blue crab and the abundant mushroom varieties of the Mid-Atlantic region — in a baked, stuffed format that became a standard of American entertaining. The blue crab (Callinectes sapidus) has been central to the cuisine of Maryland and Virginia for thousands of years, harvested by Algonquian peoples long before European contact and developed into a commercial industry through the 19th and 20th centuries. Old Bay Seasoning, created in 1939 by German-Jewish spice merchant Gustav Brunn in Baltimore — who had recently fled Nazi Germany and brought his expertise in spice blending with him — is the defining seasoning of Maryland crab cooking. Acquired by McCormick & Company in 1990, Old Bay remains one of the most regionally specific spice blends in American cuisine. Stuffed mushrooms as a format — button or cremini mushrooms hollowed and filled with a savory mixture — became a fixture of American catering and party food from the 1950s through the 1980s, appearing in a wide variety of community cookbooks and published recipe guides. The crab version became particularly associated with holiday entertaining in the Mid-Atlantic region, where blue crab is both abundantly available and culturally emblematic of the Chesapeake season.