Putting our favorite celebrity chef in the Di Pasquale’s kitchen to talk foodie love

It’s almost inconceivable that through their long friendship that celebrity chef Nancy Longo of Pierpoint Restaurant has never been on the show but she finally joins Nestor at Di Pasquale’s in Canton on the Maryland Crab Cake Tour for an absolute primer education in Maryland cuisine and the importance of quality ingredients. Come smell what we’re cooking…

Nestor Aparicio and celebrity chef Nancy Longo discuss Maryland cuisine at Di Pasquales, a restaurant since 1914. They highlight the restaurant’s sausages, broccoli ravioli, and pizza, noting Nancy’s preference for minimal tomato sauce. Nancy shares her culinary idiosyncrasies, like avoiding dried peas in fried rice. They reminisce about the Taste of the NFL event, where Nancy raised over a million dollars for food-related charities. Nancy discusses her innovative meal boxes for people with health issues and her efforts to keep her restaurant relevant post-pandemic. They also touch on the history of crab cakes and the importance of quality ingredients in cooking.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Maryland cuisine, celebrity chef, crab cakes, sausage, pizza, Pierpoint restaurant, Baltimore, food history, culinary traditions, restaurant business, pandemic impact, food inflation, charity events, food education, local ingredients.

SPEAKERS

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Speaker 1, Nancy Longo, Nestor Aparicio

Nestor Aparicio  00:00

Welcome home. We are W, N, S, T. Am 1570 task of Baltimore. We are Baltimore positive. I am positively in a very positive place. I’m looking at cranes and construction workers. I’m looking at over Canton and Canton crossing. We are here at deep squalees. Is our first time here. They’ve been doing this since 1914 since 2021 here in the new Canton location. As you can see, it is beautiful, as is my guest, Nancy Longo for Pierpoint restaurant, celebrity chef to the stars as well as me. It’s all brought to you by our friends at the Maryland lottery. Back to the Future, I’ve already given Nancy a scratch off here, Joe and Dom, we’re gonna come by. We’re gonna continue to talk about sausage food. I went to the bathroom and I couldn’t get in, which gave me a line for two minutes to look at all of the soups, all of the pastas, all of the cannoli fixings, all of the meatballs, and that’s not even the fresh pastas and different things that they have here. You’re a neighborhood girl, you know,

Nancy Longo  00:54

you know, I come here to eat meatballs. No, he makes pizzas. Are awesome. You’re a pizza person? Yeah, I’m a pizza person. I am. All

Nestor Aparicio  01:03

right, I gotta keep you.

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Nancy Longo  01:04

I used to go get me nice to get pizza at the old place, but I think he’s just upped his game here. I mean, pizzas are just wild.

Nestor Aparicio  01:12

I want to be honest with you, I’ve been in here an hour, and it’s slow because it’s morning, it’s breakfast, words, then here lunch by the time the insanity by the time Pete karenji gets here an hour and a half from now, it’s going to be nuts, right? And the restaurant sides over here, and the deli sides over there, and it’s a big circle, sort of, there’s wines all sort of thing. Everybody that’s come in here has bragged about something different in here. Well, I mean, I was bragging about the sausage, which brought me here. I had the broccoli Rob ravioli, unbelievable. I took that home with a sausage and sauce. I told them I had a meat cheese sauce because they sell it to me in VATS down there. We freeze it. And I had the Michaels of Brooklyn that comes in the can the jar. It’s good jar sauce, so I but I haven’t had his sauce yet. And there’s a I had people here said, this is the best sandwich. This is the best this is the best that I’ve told, I’ve been told, eat the meatballs here. Get the meatballs up. Now you’re telling me the pizza, the pizza

Nancy Longo  02:08

is really good. He has, um, you know, I want the cannoli. He has a mushroom pizza in here that it’s like a white pizza with mush is so good I don’t have white pizza. Here’s the thing. Problem is, is that I can’t eat sauce, pizza, tomato sauce in too many places, because most people don’t understand. You know, how Italians make sauce pizza, you’re supposed to breathe on it. So we got into this place where we dump all these tomatoes on there, and the tomatoes like squishing down my face, and that’s not how I got a pizza as a child.

Nestor Aparicio  02:42

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First of all, I want a sauce, a real sauce. I want to be able to just

Nancy Longo  02:45

breathe over it, yeah, like I want to be barely be able to see it. I want to know it’s there, but barely there. And too many people make pizza with too much tomato sauce on it. I’ve not had a tomato sauce pizza here. You’ve ever been to Chicago? Then, right? The Deep I’ve been to Chicago. I mean, deep dishes that. So I grew up with, I never had a flat pizza. My grandmother would come on Sundays, and Renzo would make pizza out of facade. So I got it takes two days. No, it doesn’t, it’s a three hour gig you made, but she would put little dots of tomato on top. So, you know, everything you have as a childhood memory becomes your plug in. I

Nestor Aparicio  03:24

still have Houston Oiler stuff because of that, yes, yes

Nancy Longo  03:27

for the rest of your life. So I can’t eat pizza at places because I see the cheese sliding off because they put too much sauce on there. I have to say to them, light on the sauce if I order pizza somewhere,

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Nestor Aparicio  03:39

Nancy, I respect your chef as much as I respect anybody cheffing. What are your other bizarre idiosyncrasies about foods that you’re like? I know people do it that way, but I’m not doing it that way. I’m not

Nancy Longo  03:54

eating I laugh because people laugh at me and they’re like, I’ve never seen anybody. They will order boxes from us because we do meal boxes. We do meal boxes for people who have a family member with dementia, or they have a family member that’s got cancer, family member with other issues. And so they’ll order stuff where we have people that work too much, and they just but we do it specifically for these people. We’re not like massive selling boxes, and every week there’s something, there’s something, there’s a list, and then you just call and you order you want. So one of the things they always make me laugh about is I make fried rice. Having had lessons in Chinese young age, I can’t stand little dried up green peas, okay, but if I’ve had fresh ones, they’re really good. So they’ll laugh. They’ll go, how come I’m gonna get the fried rice. You put some peas in there from, like, I’ll put them on top, because I can’t stand when they get all dried out. Just weird, weird. And Iris, think you see, okay, all right, just like most people I know that are Italian, they don’t do green peppers. We only do yellow ones and red ones roasted. Or see, I think

Nestor Aparicio  04:55

you’re famous, by the way, Nancy Longo here from Pierpoint restaurants. But my life for friend, I swear I don’t remember. Ever doing radio with you, but you did sit down with me at a Super Bowl. You were the taste of the NFL chef for 25 years. 25 years. Yep, they’ve wrecked that event. We can we can talk at length. The NFL has wrecked a lot of things, if you wish, but I will say I know you through that. I know you best through

Nancy Longo  05:18

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that. I think that was one of the most amazing fundraiser raisers to ever be involved with. I mean, and there were years when, you know, the Ravens would be in the Super Bowl, and I’d be like, okay, Nestor and Marty bass are going to be at my fill in for my player filled in. Oh, my God, we got the beat up at the front door. But you’re talking about raising money for food related charities. It was the most amazing thing. And, yeah, it was a bum,

Nestor Aparicio  05:46

you know, I would take a picture you and me and send it to Wayne Castro. You should I do that right now? Yes, if I live, because Wayne loves me, and I love Wayne, and Wayne loves you, guy, Nancy and I selfie. There we go. So Wayne tell me about who Wayne

Nancy Longo  06:01

is, and they Wayne was. It was the Minnesota guy who was involved with a lot of charitable things, as well as owning a bunch of restaurants and and he came up with this idea that he would partner with the NFL and they would have an event. And then Max was his partner. Max was great guy, but Max was in the music industry, and knew how to do stagecraft, and so they put this event together, and they would get fabulous musicians to come and do this event. And then there were

Nestor Aparicio  06:30

ARIA Speedwagon has played that Billy Joel’s band, just Barenaked Ladies. I mean, they always had great, great bands.

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Nancy Longo  06:37

And so they would all do this. And then there were 32 of us chefs and a few from the hometown, and we would raise money, to tune of well over a million dollars a night or more for food related chairs. That has does not include the chefs in their restaurants.

Nestor Aparicio  06:52

By the way, this is always the night before the Super Bowl. Just everybody knows Saturday night Nancy would come into town like on Wednesday, and you always did a crab related Yes, well, because it was under a Ravens banner, yes. And we had the Ravens table, and I attended this event, 23 out of the 25 years with you, right? So every year the night before the Super Bowl was sort of like same time next year, Nancy and I would get together, and your table was like, you Matt Stover, or you had cadre, or you had John Ogden, there’s over Ernest Beiner,

Nancy Longo  07:25

well, and we would laugh, because they would be like, Okay, those ravens people, one year, brought a Johnny United style. We’re gonna go the next year to Indianapolis. We had Wayne. Had to have little talk me, do not bring the Johnny United style to Indianapolis. I said, Well, we’re not going to, because they’ve already stolen it. Someone stole it. And furthermore, next year, we will bring Edgar Allen Poe’s grave. And they went, we’re holding you to that. We know. We built a five foot tall,

Nestor Aparicio  07:53

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I know, great. It was great. It

Nancy Longo  07:55

was burnt out with a Ray Lewis dog coming out of fog machine. So they would say, Yeah. The other teams were, they do not attach us to that ravens quad, because they have things going for you. Best decorated team always did. I always say we, you know, I was originally theater and set design major. Oh, I did not know this about you. So I really got into it, besides the food thing. But you know, it was like, it was a great thing, because you could go to wherever that Super Bowl city was, and you could bring them a real crab cake. Not one where they go, Oh, I got one last week, and it had some green peppers in it. And I might, I think I was scratching my eyeballs out, or they’re using Dungeness crab. Oh, absolutely. Or what tastes like, yeah, or something from China that it’s been in a can on a boat for a year. It’s gray. What in the hell no, we can’t serve that to anybody. So it was kind of cool. Matter of fact, the one year that we were there, Billy Joel band was there and Mark Rivera. Mark Rivera was like, hey, it’s the crab cake lady. The other chefs were like, do you know everybody I would laugh? And I said, Well, I did cook for the band. They were fun. And Mark used to get me to deliver them to his dad, New Jersey. So it was kind of okay. I really, really love him. Great stuff. So, you know all these wonderful things you know that you get to do in the restaurant business make up for all the crazy, awful things that we put up with, like, the last couple years, anybody in this business cannot say they’ve had a lot of fun, right? And this year, regardless of whether or not there’s business or whatever it’s, the cost of goods is just like literally making you nuts. It’s crazy. Well, that’s in every industry, right? Yeah, it is. It is, um, we’ll get to the political part, whatever me. Like, for instance, I went, because I have those kids camps, I went to buy some chocolate, and I’m a snob, so I gotta go buy some Belgian chocolate. And I buy the chocolate back in April, because you put it away, you don’t. The temperature change, and it was $100 so it was 10, $10 a pound. I went back because I got more kids that signed up, I don’t know, maybe a month and a half later, and it was $140

Nestor Aparicio  10:11

and you’re just like, went from 10 a pound to 14 a pound. Yeah, yeah. So that’s 40% by my right. That’s 40% in two months. So over the course of a year, that’s hype. That’s an inflation people Belgium, do Venezuelan inflation or something like,

Nancy Longo  10:27

we became a 40% tariff. It’s kind of crazy. I think there’s actually, I why I’m saying this is, I believe there’s a little thin layer gouging going on with it, too. So it’s not been easy for anybody that’s been in this business. But you know, we still love what we do. And I think a lot of people need to understand that we were busted our butt to make it happen. And it’s a restaurant business is a drug, you know, you get in and you’re on. I love this. I can’t. Sports

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Nestor Aparicio  10:53

Radio was like that for me. It was, yeah, now I just, I do this and sports, I just, but you

Nancy Longo  10:58

didn’t, you did you write at some point I was absolutely right. Still, I’m right because I thought we had, we had the John Steadman connection. At some point,

Nestor Aparicio  11:05

John Steadman connection as well the crab cake in a general sense. I’ll give you the whole background, because you’re probably like, why do you do a crab cake tour? Literally, you were one of the first people I thought of, and you could speak to this probably 15 years ago. I reached you and said, you get relationships at McCormick and different places like that, and you’re the celebrity chef. Maybe we could do some sort of cooking show or go around town and have coffee and talk. You know what I mean, like the crab cake tour happened during the plague in 2020 and I heard you talking to Joe off air about restaurants and the plague and COVID, and how tough it was and keeping places in business and how it depressed people. I walked across the harbor because I lived at Harbor court. I walked past the aquarium to amicis, and this was in the depths of the plague, right? It’s a bad part of the plague where nobody had PPP, there was no shot. We didn’t know what was going on. You know, aren’t Schindler’s making stuff up about bleach all that. Oh, yeah. And I

Nancy Longo  12:08

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think the only way most people were surviving in those days is, I’ve never seen such kindness people. Everybody had a GoFundMe there was like, throwing money at your employees because they didn’t know whether you’re going to survive. And they’re like, Okay, no, this place I like that place, I like

Nestor Aparicio  12:23

Right? And I walked over to amicis, and I ordered, you know, Penny amici which, by the way, has the sausage from Deepa squalis in it. Now I know why it’s so freaking good. Yeah, right. So I walked in there, and there’s Jody and Penny, which masks on and Scott, and they’re serving bags in the front. The whole restaurant’s dark, right? Because they just had and you would stop and get your bag, and it was like Oliver Twist. You would, you know, you get, you swipe your credit card, and you’d leave, and you’d have tears in your eyes and say, I hope you make it. I hope I make it. I hope my radio station makes it. I hope your business makes it right. All I kept thinking about, and this is a plug for amicis meatballs, which will be coming later in August. Is I hope that I can come here and get a penny of meat. You get a meatball. Sit and have the meatballs and bread that I love so much there. Sit at the bar again, because we’re just trying to keep businesses in business. So this is five years ago. So five years ago, I decided to take the remnants of my Raven shows and the Monday Night Live show, and said, every business needs business. And I started looking through old pictures and getting wistful. And there’s a picture of Ray Lewis eating his first crab cake and his first crab with me. And there’s John Ogden eating crab cakes with me at the bar. And Brian Billick had never seen a crab in his life before. I brought him crabs, and then he’s taking me on his boat over to St Michael’s, to the Crab Shack, or whatever it’s called, over there, getting crabs. So I thought to myself, this is the Baltimore thing, unfortunately for Darren. It’s not sausage. Unfortunately for you know, it’s right. But crab cake is the thing, right? So I said to myself, everyone I know, including Nancy, thinks they have a great crab cake,

Nancy Longo  14:07

right? They’re all just different. They’re all completely it’s weird. Years ago, with Southwestern, one of the airlines, did a piece about the tale of two crab cakes, and it was, it was a great article. And it was like, if you really want the two best that they liked, you were going to go to Cocos and you were going to come to Pierrepoint, okay? And I thought that was interesting. And then, and then they, if you read the article, they said, Well, if you need this, like, monstrously really yummy tasting giant ball. Go to Cocos. Now, if you want to go over to the caviar section of the crab cakes, do you want to go visit Nancy? They said, Well, I thought you were bougie. Basically, he did well. And they said, because there’s no bread in there, which there is none. And then we had a regular one, and we also have a smoked one. So the one that we’ve done with smoke started as a thing I was doing for the it was a reenactment

Nestor Aparicio  15:06

of something good to me. I’d like, it’s actually really

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Nancy Longo  15:10

good. If you ever drank bourbon, or you like Sherry, or you like high end tequilas, then you would really like that crab cake. It is not like it’s not like barbecue smoke. It’s more like smoked fish smoke. It’s more, more of a little bit of pixel salted, yes, but it does pick up the flavor of the cherry and apple that we use in there. The other thing about smoked food, which was a colonial thing, is it adds age to something. When something gets smoked, it literally will keep the outside from growing bacteria. So that’s why they smoke

Nestor Aparicio  15:45

everything flowing. That’s why Fish, fish, fish in Sweden, in Norway, are all smoked. So maybe that’s my and really, this is a grown up conversation we’re having about food right now, which is your palate changes, right? At least my palate. I’m 56 now my palate is different. Maybe I should go back and try a sardine or things like that that I’ve never

Nancy Longo  16:07

well, and that’s the thing. Like when those kids come to that camp, sometimes I’ll get a kid as young as 10. Most of them are older. I’ve

Nestor Aparicio  16:14

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been a sardine in 45 years, when I was 10 and it made me sick, like it just anchovies. I think I hate and festival, if I get a good Caesar salad, I love it. Intro

Nancy Longo  16:25

Greek Festival a couple weeks ago I did too, and I had a big, huge plate of fried smells. And I was like, Oh, my God,

Nestor Aparicio  16:32

this is so good. I saw them selling that. And I

Nancy Longo  16:35

thought, Oh, I did. I was the one shopping Creek town, right? Yeah. I have a friend of mine who’s Argentinian. She loves them too. With the two of us out there, like munching at these things. I got the souvlaki because that’s who I am. But the thing is, what I try to tell these kids are, you have to sign up and you have to eat one spoon of something. If you don’t want to eat it, I’m not going to fight with you. However, I’m trying to develop your palate, and then you might decide I don’t want to eat this. I don’t like this, or you don’t really know why you’re just grouchy that day or whatever, but later on in life, you might have a date with some girl, and you might go to a restaurant, and she might say she wants that you’re going, you know, I never said I was gonna. I didn’t like that when I was a kid, but I tasted it. I’m not really sure I feel about it, so I’ll try it again, and then I try to make sure that they go, You know what? I liked it. Because if we close our minds off certain things, we never learn anything new. And life is about curiosity, and curiosity with food is endless. It’s just endless. And so you just keep going on and on and on with that. And you know, that’s that’s my thing. That is one of the reasons why, and I’m just a restaurant, you asked me some things about we’re doing. We do these crazy dinners in there that people sign up for. So the next one is a Bastille Day One later this month, and then there will be an Italian picnic, which the entire place is covered in grass. And it’s all wonderful picnic food from Italy. We had a Frenchman a few weeks ago every three months. Oh, they’re absolutely fabulous, but it’s about allowing me to be able to use my brain and still be creative. That’s the thing with you know, you’re in business, in your restaurant for 36 years, you can figure somebody can get really bored and stale, so you have to come up with other experiences to continue to keep making it happen. And you know, like, so you, you’re you’re grateful that you made it through the pandemic. So then you go, Okay, well, now I gotta up my game, because I gotta do something new and something different. So those dinners are crazy, but then some of them are just like you pop in, we might have national dumpling day, and you get a menu. There’s 25 different kinds of dumplings, and we handmade every last one of them, of some crazy concoctions we made. We’re just trying to have some fun. I’m trying to give people an opportunity to say, you know, we can always go to a restaurant. I got the same menu, same thing, saying all this stuff. How about one night? I just decided I want to check that out. Or some people come in and they go, she’s the salad lady. Yeah, I am. I love salad, so I’ll make him a salad. They’ll be like, I’m not even gonna ask what’s in it. I only tell you what I don’t like. Don’t worry, that’s not gonna be in there. So no, yeah, I just try. I’m trying to some fun. Well, that’s what the crafting

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Nestor Aparicio  19:17

tour was for me. Yes, was getting around town and having the chains taken off from Darren and all my old sports listers are saying, stick to sports. Stick to sports is a middle finger to me. Politically, it just is like, I’m more.

Nancy Longo  19:30

Here’s the funny thing. Seem to think about that sports thing, sports and food are intertwined with a lot and a lot of times, how many sports players have ended up opening a restaurant or interested in food, we joked about the John Stedman thing. John Stedman and my dad were very close friends, and thank you, Jesus, that one day you literally made a CD for me from an old tape that John and my dad did in a radio show because my father ended up with dementia and I could never understand him in his later years. But John Stedman used the. Write videos about food in this column all the time. It would intertwine in between these sports things. I have a few,

Nestor Aparicio  20:07

well, we’re had a great it was a great meal. Nance,

Nancy Longo  20:12

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that kind of guy, you know. And you just think about this stuff. But a lot of sports people, you know the story about amicis or, I mean, Geno’s, I think is very funny. You know, you ever heard the story about Geno’s? Geno Marchetti and the burgers? Yes, and he was friends with Colonel Sanders, right? That’s how he got and so the Colonel Sanders came to him and said, Can we put that in there? And guess what happened? We rightfully have been able to say Maryland is a fried chicken place more than a lot of other places. So what happened when they put all those Colonel Sanders in the amici started, I mean, Genos, they started selling more fried chicken that’s graded, and they and they all ended up being Kentucky fried chicken place, sure, until Gina re emerged later. But how is it that we have a farm store, rural farm store every corner in the city, and they’re always selling a lot of fried chicken and

Nestor Aparicio  21:10

Western fries, yeah? Like, that’s such a Baltimore. We had him in Mother Hubbard’s in East Baltimore. You know, Nancy Longo is our guest. She’s a peer point restaurant. So the crab cake thing. So the tour for me, began as every bar in Highland town had had a crab cake. Every sub shop in Dundalk went out every sub shop as a kid, yeah, had a crab cake. Sub a crab cake sandwich. They were all different. Some were filler, some were mayonnaise, some were mustardy. The Greek folks put the green peppers and red wipers and pimentos in there, which I’m fine. I’m not against any of that. If it tastes good, it is good. The crab cake thing began as a fun like, I was doing business with faith, Lee’s doing business with Costas. I knew Marcel, I knew you, I knew a bunch of people at restaurants. And then it’s turned into, like, I’m five, six years into this. Now they’re like, which has got the best one? And I’m like, this was never about best.

Nancy Longo  22:05

It’s not. It can’t You can’t be because they all have different neurons. Like,

Nestor Aparicio  22:10

I would say, if somebody picked yours and Cocos and overlooked fade leaves, they probably don’t like mustard, because faith Lee’s crab cake is the only one I’ve had, yeah, in a standard place. That’s really

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Nancy Longo  22:21

mustard Fauci. Well, mine is too. But you know what I use, hardcore, very horse radishy, my Dijon mustard, so it’s spicy. It’s, it’s got some kick to it, yes, but it’s in, I don’t know if I’d like that so well, right? You know, if you bounce that against that smoke stuff, it’s a very interesting and good flavor, but, but you have to understand it’s an education of a chef, of understanding what things work together and what things don’t some things you just don’t do and they’re weird. I remember years ago when they were, like, talking about nouvell cuisine. People were like, making all kinds of weird and strange things. You’re just like, okay, at some point you have to realize things don’t work. So you learn things about culture when you you go to culinary school and you understand, like, if I make food from Maryland, I can mix it with things from New England, because there’s a lot of same generalities of things that are there, like clams or oysters or this stuff. I can do the same thing with things from Louisiana, because there are things from there that we go back and forth. It’s about being able to mix things without making it too bizarre that people will write, recognize and trust me, I love failing. You know what I I love almost every crab cake I’ve eaten

Nestor Aparicio  23:34

outside, I would agree with that. I had a horrible experience in montgomery county.

Nancy Longo  23:39

I must not have the cotties. Let me talk about that in a sec. Well, they’re more salty, right? So Dan Rodricks and I did this thing when we did the fish thing, we’re talking about cotties. And he’s like, you’ll do the cotties, and we’ll do the cotties. Well, the cotties have two different things. We have a French cottie, a Portuguese Cotty, and a Baltimore City cottie. So we all know the Baltimore City cottie was a thing that was primarily in the Jewish neighborhoods, but made by the Irish, which means the damn thing was full of potatoes and had very little fish in it. Okay? Because they couldn’t have, you know, you can’t, you have to have fin fish. You couldn’t have shellfish. Okay, so, you know, Barry Levinson, years ago, when I was cooking for a movie, he had this girl that worked for me, she came, and she’s, what are you bugging him about Los Angeles? Like, oh no, we’re talking about stale cotties at the 711 under the plastic. You wouldn’t understand now, I am more of the type that likes the French Cotty, which is mostly leeks, lots of fish in there, and some potato. So it’s oniony. Oh, it’s got a lot of things going, okay, yes, and they’re really yummy. But again, it might not. It might not. Baltimore

Nestor Aparicio  24:51

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County wouldn’t be onion forward. No, like, like, like, a Can

Nancy Longo  24:55

I get? Yeah, yeah, or a hockey puck, right, my opinion. But I. I i like them with the fish. So when Dan and I did that last fish dinner, we had some of each kind, and we were like, trying to explain to them that the tale of two cotties that like depends on where you live, what you put in these things. And I think that’s the same thing that goes back to that crab cake. Well, you know a crab cake? Do you really know where the story of a crab cake came from, because this is a crazy one. All right,

Nestor Aparicio  25:22

Nancy’s teaching us here. Nancy Longo from Pierpoint doing Baltimore seafood history. Paul

Nancy Longo  25:27

Prudhomme and I were very good friends, and he and I for years would talk about crab cakes. I remember the first time I brought him one, and he said that was really good after we breaded it and deep fried. And I said to my friend, Marty, please tell me I didn’t make a face. He said, No, you were really good about it. I said, Okay, I love fried crab cakes, yeah, but they would put like, breading, like bread crumbs, okay, deep fry them. But I’m like, okay, so originally, a crab cake was spawned from a thing in Louisiana where they would make corn cakes. So the slaves who worked the water trade would make crab cakes. Not a crab cake, it was a corn cake. So it was a corn pancake filled with crab meat.

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Nestor Aparicio  26:14

Taco now, so it sound like a like a dog,

Nancy Longo  26:16

it was like a breakfast pancake, okay, filled with crab meat. Okay. So they would griddle on both sides, and they would eat them. So they said that, as they would spend time, oftentimes going from Louisiana through, you know, up the East Coast, back to Nova Scotia, they would make landing, sometimes in Chesapeake Bay. And at some point in time, they did, and they told these watermen there about these crab things, and they said, Well, you have plenty of crabs you could do. You could do that. So they would make them here eventually. What happened was these watermen kept saying, if we put less pancake mix in there and more crab meat, I wonder what that would taste like. And that’s how it came to be. That’s a crab cake. That’s how a crab cake came to be. It was not originally a thing that anybody here thought up.

Nestor Aparicio  27:03

So you mentioned stuff Paul prodome and and other celebrity chefs. I had Andrew Zimmern on the show in maybe 17 or eight years. 18, 2018 he came by, and he’s done the show several times. Me at the Super Bowl because he was friends Wayne kostrov coming for tasting

Nancy Longo  27:20

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NFL. Well, he’s the one running that now, Zimmern is, yeah,

Nestor Aparicio  27:23

so Zimmer said to me on this program, there’s only one way to make a crab cake. You do this and this in this simple one way, that’s it. And I looked at him, this is what before I was doing the crab cake tour and I did the What are you like? You haven’t been to Maryland,

Nancy Longo  27:38

dude. You know, how many counties do have in Maryland? Because for every county there’s a crab

Nestor Aparicio  27:42

cake, there are 23 counties and a city there’s 40 minutes, about 24 municipalities. I had a crab cake in every county in the state three summers ago for my 25th anniversary. Last year, I did 26 oysters, 26 ways in Twilight, oyster fritters, oysters. I had to oyster everything. Right? This year, it’s my 27th anniversary, and I swear I was gonna do cream and Maryland crap soup. I was gonna go around the state, yeah, holding on to that. That might be 28 what I decided to do this year, and this is where you come in. Yeah. I’m taking my 27 favorite dishes in Baltimore, my 27 honest to God, favorite things and places to eat. And that’s what August is going to be. Beginning. August to do absolutely so I’m getting around town, and I’m picking my favorite places. Everybody knows amicis is going to be on it. Everybody knows like how much I love the gumbo at slaw and Coopers. How delicious that is. So it’s going to be little. There’s going to be an egg custard snowball involved in this right? Peach cake season is on right now, you know? So I’m just mentioning these little things that I have, but this is going to get me to 27 different businesses in 27 different ways. None of it has anything in common. It’s not any specific kind of food. There’s Indian food, there’s Maryland food, there’s canned food. There’s

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Nancy Longo  29:09

been a few of those, for some friends of mine that are black, about the 10 most important pieces of food that the African American community has given to America. Go ahead. What are they? Well, one of them has been reimagined because you and I both know that macaroni and cheese originally was an Italian thing, but because they were in Georgia and they were using like pimento cheese, macaroni cheese is one of them.

Nestor Aparicio  29:33

That’s why mac and cheese is on every every soul

Nancy Longo  29:36

food man, correct. Okay, collard greens. Collard greens, of course, right? Gumbo is actually, believe it or not, because it was, it was an African, Spanish thing. You have to understand everything in Louisiana is like,

Nestor Aparicio  29:47

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came off a boat, yep, yep, yep. We did do,

Nancy Longo  29:51

what is the name of that? It’s a different it’s a different thing that is made with pecans. That’s not like a regular pecan pie. It’s. I’d have to pull this whole list up with them. We did do some corn cakes, because, again, that is a that is an African American thing. There’s another, like a chicken hash that I made for them that just came from South Carolina. Anyway, I’m the whole these are 18th century. These are these, are these are you cannot bring a population of human beings to a country and say to them, by the way, you’re going to be cooking for us, and not say your your food is American food. So really, most all American food is soul food, right? Everything else we borrowed from Europe or Asia that we brought with us,

Nestor Aparicio  30:37

like freedom fries, exactly, right?

Nancy Longo  30:42

But, but, um, I’d have to pull that menu for she’s actually having another birthday in August. We’re gonna do the same. Pick 10 different things, but these have you want to show the most known things. One of them might have even been like fried catfish or instead of like lake trout, stuff that we lake trout was so used to knowing about matter of fact, because we did Juneteenth and we had a whole I said there were some people coming late. I said to them, I gotta, like, I have to pull the gumbo back, Chris, because we’re not gonna be goes, because these guys at the bar had four bowls. Now, I learned how to cook gumbo from Paul, so I know you’re like, a Cooper’s one day. Oh, there we go. You come, you come over and you’re happy.

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Nestor Aparicio  31:22

Here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna have you next month. I’m doing the show down at slash at the end of the month, and by then, I will have 20 of the 27 foods out on the table. And what I am hoping is that I inspire some people to maybe run around to some of these places and try some little things that I like. Some of them are very one of them is a pretzel. You know what? I mean, I have a pretzel that I like. So none of this is Gucci or bougie or even expensive. Some of these things are two and three or $4 items. Well, I know you know that I enjoy.

Nancy Longo  31:55

You know? The thing is, is, it’s about the integrity of the initial thing you started with. In other words, it’s that piece of pork or piece of meat or piece of fish or something is pristine. You start with that that automatically makes the Bucha figure out whatever it is that you did to it. And so, I think so many people don’t understand that. It’s

Nestor Aparicio  32:16

like, you know, quality, greed. That’s it. That’s the beginning, the most

Nancy Longo  32:20

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you know. And the thing with is, like with families, why they can do is they have connections to get the right crab meat from the state of Maryland, or, you know, other places where you’re, you’re dealing a lot of crab meat. And I think that it’s, it does a disservice. I know it was a big fight over that, when they were talking about that blue crab stuff years ago, and you’re going, but they can’t afford to pay $50 a pound for this stuff.

Nestor Aparicio  32:48

That’s why God made Venezuela and Italy at this point. So by the way, I’m getting a little hungry. It’s lunchtime. She’s making me hungry. Nancy Longo is a celebrity chef. You can find her down at Pierpoint restaurant doing all sorts of interesting culinary things. I don’t know what else to say. You’re not like a not like a normal restaurant with a normal menu. You did that for a long time. Now, you’re sort of like we were close on demand,

Nancy Longo  33:09

closed for a year and a half during the pandemic, and someone put up the money, and we did 26,000 meal boxes, and then another 26,000 single meals for people that needed food. I’m a big believer. You know me, because I belong to everything. That’s like, it’s my job to feed everybody.

Nestor Aparicio  33:27

She’s the mother feet. When my wife was was literally fighting for her life, and I was sort of at wit’s end and a second cancer battle, you text me four days a week and said, I know you’re up at the hospital. I just saw you post the picture. You’re a mile and a half away. Dinners always on the table for you. Absolutely love you. Yep, thanks. Take a break. I’m gonna get her out next month. We’re gonna talk. I have to have you back out. Yes, promise me you’re gonna come out. I’m gonna I’m gonna make you come down to slaughter. I do the Sean Fells Point because it’s close to you. Yes, so that way you can walk over. Yep, but to the end of August, we’re gonna be doing that 27 of my favorite things to eat for 27 years of double I gotta get a new logo. I got my 26th anniversary oyster here. I gotta come up. 27 should be like a cake, or like a tiramisu or something like that, or like a muffin with blueberries in it. Yes, I’m hungry when we’re gonna find something to eat here.

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Nancy Longo  34:20

Real Italian, or that pizza. I may order one of those pizza you’re gonna, you’re gonna

Nestor Aparicio  34:25

get pizza you inhabit. Okay, all right, she’s gonna get the pizza. I’m getting the sausage. Darren, the deepest squally sausage King, is gonna be here. Joe and Dom are gonna come by. Do you know the story of how they move this thing from Highland town over

Nancy Longo  34:38

here? I don’t, I don’t. I just remember, I just remember seeing Joe and him saying, I’m gonna move over there. They made me, made me a good deal. And I went, Okay, this is, this makes me happy, because it’s in my either way. He was in my neighborhood, either way, either up there or down here, all the time. I Yes, I do come here. Matter of fact, we were laughing. We. Yeah, that we had a pope party, and Joe came to the Pope party, and it was only for Italians. We had drank all these bottles. I know, I don’t know why it was a pop up thing. At the last minute, some Italian showed

Nestor Aparicio  35:13

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up. I’ve been doing this show for 34 years, and it never popped up to have you more regularly.

Nancy Longo  35:18

You know, I got plenty of stories

Nestor Aparicio  35:21

to tell. I know you do I told DOM. I said, when you got here, I told him you were loud mouthing. Is that fair? Yeah, she is all right. Dom’s gonna be coming back. Joe’s coming over. They’re bringing she wants a white pizza with mushrooms. That

Nancy Longo  35:37

mushroom, yes, yeah,

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Nestor Aparicio  35:39

see, that’s what she that’s her thing. Are you gonna taste? I’ve had people here to tell me this sandwich, this sandwich, this sandwich. Joe said, You got to get the meatball some. She says, the pizza. Darren will swear, if you don’t get the sausage, you didn’t come to deep.

Nancy Longo  35:52

So here’s the other one. Is watch this one. So when you make a pizza here, you don’t make pizza with sauce on if it’s squirting over the edges, right? No, because, really, Italians do not make it with all that sauce, so it squirts over the edge. What is it with people in too much they’ve been in Chicago. That’s why I don’t order tomato pizzas, because they put too much sauce on them and then the crust, well, that and the crust never can get crispy because it’s got too much tomatoes. Nancy’s

Nestor Aparicio  36:19

talking off Mike, to a guy who’s not on Mike, it’s okay. You got anything you wanna say about that DOM before? I got a break, because you gotta make pizza and I gotta talk sausage.

Speaker 1  36:27

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Well, Italians, they like the simple ingredients, not too many, and quality. That’s basically,

Nestor Aparicio  36:34

we just went through that. That was just, we said, yeah, it’s the ingredients,

Nancy Longo  36:39

and you just gotta breathe. The tomato on there. It’s not supposed to be a bowl of sauce.

Speaker 1  36:45

Yeah, they overdo it.

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Nestor Aparicio  36:48

Sometimes, to me, when you put too much topping on it, the bread underneath gets, gets too slimy if I don’t hold the pizza up, if it falls and everything coops off it, nah, can’t do that. It’s gonna, it’s gotta have that, that crisp bottom, yeah, it’s gonna have that, like a cracker, kind of exactly, little crunch to it,

Speaker 1  37:07

right? And the perfect amount of toppings. That’s the key.

Nestor Aparicio  37:09

I’m hungry. Where am I gonna get some food? All right? We’re a deepest, squally marketplace. We’re here in Canton. It’s all brought to you by the Maryland lottery at back to future scratch sauce. Nancy, I think she’s gonna leave. She might stay and eat pizza with me. You’re welcome to stay. I’m not getting ready. I’m gonna try to get you likes I got, I got plenty of room. Darren’s coming over with sausage. That’s how this whole thing started. I’m gonna learn the story about how the deepest quality family got from there to here coming up next. I’m Nestor. We are W, N, S, T, A, F, 1570 Towson, Baltimore. We never stopped talking food, which makes this Baltimore positive. You.