I was at the store just now, and I passed a skid of Old Bay-seasoned potato chips.
Old Bay Seasoning is about as Maryland as it gets, but it comes with a story, as all things do.
Old Bay was invented by a Jewish-German immigrant named Gustav Brunn, who was arrested by the Nazi SS on Kristallnacht in November of 1938.
Taken to the Buchenwald concentration camp, he managed to get himself ransomed out (losing his German-based spice business in the process), after which he fled to the US, arriving in Baltimore in 1939.
It was in Baltimore that same year that Brunn created the Maryland crab and seafood seasoning that is now so deeply identified with the state.
So what’s in Old Bay?
It’s a mixture of salt, celery seed, red pepper, black pepper, paprika, laurel leaves, mustard, cardamom, cloves, and ginger.
Originally sold by Brunn’s “Baltimore Spice Company” and called the "Delicious Brand Shrimp and Crab Seasoning", it was later renamed Old Bay with production and sales rights sold, in 1990, to another Maryland-based spice company, McCormick & Company.
The “Old Bay” name, by the way, comes from the Old Bay Line, a passenger ship line that ferried folks up and down the Chesapeake Bay from Baltimore to Norfolk, Virginia in the early 1900s.
1 comment:
Actually, the Old Bay story is even more complex and ironic. The way I heard it, when Brunn, having escaped Nazi Germany and reached Baltimore, he was initially hired by hometown spice company McCormick—and then almost immediately let go because he was Jewish. It was after this that he set himself up in business as the Baltimore Spice Company.
I hope McCormick had to dig really deep to acquire Old Bay...
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