I could have, I suppose, written about the trip I made to Bangkok ostensibly to finish up a book but, in reality, to search out a fantastic spicy catfish salad I had eaten 20 years earlier.

Or, I could have written about going back to Vienna to finally eat at a Hungarian restaurant I had stood in front of years earlier as a student, listening to the gypsy orchestra but knowing that I did not have the money to eat there.

But I won’t. Those were trips I made across space. This is one about a trip across time.

Last week, my wife went off to Washington, D.C. to teach a two-week course for new leaders. She left behind a half carton of jumbo lump crab that I didn’t find until Wednesday. Then, for a reason known probably only to my late father, I got a hankering for and became almost obsessed with making a dish from my (and my father’s) distant past – Crab Norfolk, the kind invented by and served at the old O’Donnell’s Sea Grill restaurant of my youth – the one on E Street in downtown Washington D.C. (before they moved to Bethesda).

Unlike geographical culinary adventures, temporal ones require neither airplane nor car. Sometimes, you just need to Google something and then cook the results of your search.

In this case, my Google search for Crab Norfolk recipes brought some surprises. A State of Virginia website claimed, of course, that the dish was invented in Norfolk. (Wrong!). There were other claimants as well and lots and lots of gussified versions bearing scant resemblance to the simple dish served at O’Donnell’s. But I ultimately found hope.

It turned out that, back in 1982 , Phyllis Richman, the restaurant critic and food editor of The Washington Post, had written a nostalgic piece for the paper about favorite Washington dishes (“Washington’s Bill of Fare”]. It was a compendium of stories and recipes. Among recipes for Stephenson’s Coconut Custard Pie, potato salad from The Florida Avenue Grill, Rich’s cheese blintzes, Sholl’s Cateteria’s crab cakes, and the famous rum buns at Hogate’s Seafood Restaurant, lo and behold, there I found the original recipe for Crab Norfolk done the O’Donnell’s way – nothing but crab, butter, and a dash of vinegar.

So I made it. It was perfect, the only difference being that while a dish with half a stick of butter meant nothing but deliciousness to a ten-year-old, to a septuagenarian, it tasted even deliciouser and even more positively decadent, just all-around betterer (and butterer).

So no, I won’t be writing about spicy Thai catfish salad in Bangkok and I won’t write about humongous flaming platters of Hungarian skewered meats and sausages in Vienna.

No, this “Incredible Culinary Journey” takes me physically no further than the crab boats across the street. Temporally, however, it takes me across generations of taste memories and smiles in the sunny recesses of my mind.

And that, my friends, is a pretty incredible culinary journey.

Peter Hartjens

St. Michaels, MD

 Click here for the recipe and a bit more culinary nostalgia.