I’m reading The Food of a Younger Land, Mark Kurlansky’s compilation of food writing from the government-sponsored Federal Writers Project. In the 1940s, the FWP set up five regional divisions and sent unemployed writers out to collect stories on local food and eating traditions.  Submissions were haphazard and the intended guidebook was never finished because of the war. The unedited articles sat in boxes at the Library of Congress and a few years ago Kurlansky went looking for the choice bits.

He writes that Maryland and other border states were assigned to the project’s Southern region because of their Census designation. The Census Bureau didn’t care that Marylanders ate fried chicken and biscuits, not baked beans and brown bread.  But the culinary zoning makes sense, he says, because it brought in states that “had sided with the Union but whose food traditions, and many other traditions are clearly southern.”

I’m headed to my home state this afternoon, and it’s true–the Mid-Atlantic Tidewater is a uniquely edible southern subregion, like the Delta or the Lowcountry. Maryland’s grain-growing north and west sided with the Union in the war, but the lower tobacco (slave) counties and the Eastern Shore were strong Southern sympathizers. Martial law was declared because the Feds doubted the state’s true colors and feared the capital would be surrounded. It’s a complicated, controversial story, but the gist is that a massive campaign to arrest sympathizers and stack the election may be why Maryland ultimately went Union. The final vote came with a resolution to recognize secession and support an independent South.

The cultural split is still alive. Driving the marshy former Tobacco Coast with its airy curing barns and rows of chicken houses, you forget you’re an hour or two from D.C. and the Beltway suburbs (except for the million-dollar marinas and duck clubs where wealthy legislators and lobbyists spend their weekends.) Even the gritty city of Baltimore feels like a southern port town more than a northeastern hub—shabbier, slower, a little scarier, but holding down the soul.

When I was growing up in Annapolis we sang our state song “Maryland my Maryland” every day. Later I learned it was a bloodthirsty secessionist anthem with lines like “Virginia shall not call in vain” and “Huzza! she spurns the northern scum!” Then I went further south, to college in the watery old otherworld of Saint Mary’s County. I lived in a mildewy 1960s beach cottage with a yard of loblolly pines and a jellyfish-strewn beach, where blue crabs sometimes crawled into the closets and one of my roommates communed with the ghosts of war prisoners and drowned sailors’ wives. (More practically, she also brought motorcycles back from the dead.)

Southern Maryland is my Maryland (Huzza!) and I can’t wait to get home and eat. Starting with my once-a-summer treat, which when it’s not crawling in closets is swimming in the sunny shallows of the Chesapeake Bay. My birthday celebration isn’t officially over until the night each August I come mouth to claw with Callinectes sapidus—the “beautiful savory swimmer,” the succulent prize of the Chesapeake and the sweetest, fiercest crab in crabdom. (If a Dungeness and a Blue had a fight…)

last year's family feast

Blue crabs and oysters are the heart of the Chesapeake story. Seafood was fundamental to the Tidewater diet since long before European settlement, and crabs were a locals-only staple until a rail line was run down the Shore in the 1870s. Crab and oyster production became deeply identified with the tight-knit watermen’s communities (it’s watermen, never fishermen, in these parts), their intimate knowledge of the Bay, and their skill with wood. They were master designers, builders, and repairers of hardy shallow water workboats, most famously the Chesapeake skipjack, the last working fishing sailboat in North America.

Nowadays the boats are motorized and crabs can run $250 a bushel. They’ve been depleted by overfishing, as well as decades of bare-dirt farming (tobacco and then corn, and more recently, soy), industrial pollution, and nutrient overload from the Delmarva poultry industry. Last year the population was down 70 percent from 1990, about a fifth of what it was in the early seventies.

The Department of Commerce gave Maryland and Virginia a $20 million grant to help create economic alternatives for watermen and processors, increase regulation, and rebuild stocks. New harvest limits were implemented, aimed at leaving more than half the population unharvested and reducing the female harvest by a third. This year there was good news: 400 million crabs overwintered in the Bay, up from 280 million the year before. The female population doubled and males were up by 50%.  Unfortunately the number of wee ones that are next year’s spawn– the “young-of-the-year”–stayed the same.  The pressure’s now on to keep the youngsters out of the haul, and to continue repopulating the ladies.

A message from the Crabfat Preservation Society

We’re not “eating to save” the blue crab yet because the fishery is still vulnerable. Harvest conservation is underway but it doesn’t solve the environmental pollution problem.  Stricter ag and industry regs are a hard sell in Perdue country. In the meantime, locals can buy from reputable shops rather than off a truck, paying a little more but supporting the licensed watermen who comply with the harvest plan. Or you can just get a rec license and do a little chicken-necking yourself, as long as you throw back the females.

Maryland expats need their annual purification ritual. You start remembering where you came from with these, while you’re digging out the mallets and papering the table.

But you haven’t really been home til you’ve felt the triple sting–a swim with the jellyfish, a sixer of Boh (also an expat, that mustachioed traitor), and an eyeful of Old Bay. (Ocular pain is unavoidable.  See—I blink, I turn away, I curse, but I don’t stop picking…)

On my birthday the gang quit work early and headed for Sonoma…

taking Highway 116 to Sebastopol, where the dogs requested a pee and Sequoia Drive-In’s killer fries.

Then we headed west to Freestone, where we bought a mushroom fougasse from the Wildflour bakery, known for its wood-fired hearth oven, loaf-sized sticky buns, and hippie garden full of raspberries and sunflowers.

We followed the Russian River through misty woods that felt like West Virginia, admiring half-hidden gnome houses and stopping to pick wild blackberries.

Driving the Bohemian Highway, we spotted the Friday farmers market in Occidental. Cool-weather greens and root crops in August are exotic for those of us from 60 scorching miles east. We bagged carrots and beets, several kinds of Italian peppers, Gravenstein apples (Sonoma’s heritage apple, producers of which are dying off,) and a salt-topped rosemary goat-cheese birthday chocolate.

We pulled over on the rocky headlands of Sonoma Coast State Park, and wound down a steep trail to where the waves lurched in a wild lonely cove. It feels right to see the ocean on a birthday, especially from such a deserted place. No matter how hard the facts or how heavy the mind, no matter what part of the past you are missing, no matter how feeble your outlook, there is the ocean, as beautiful and mysterious as anything. Up on shore, we’re always learning more about the structure of the world, which should mean we are also increasingly in awe of it. But mostly we’re not standing in wonder, we’re pretending we know how everything works around here. We think we’re a year smarter than last.  At the ocean it’s hard to pull this over on yourself, because you’re at the edge of something so secret, vast, and inexplicable. Like our knowledge of reality, its horizon always recedes as we approach. Everyone marvels at the ocean, I think. Of course it can be too wondrous, leading to a desperate lunge off the rocks or a last cold walk into the waves.  But it doesn’t make me feel insignificant or powerless. More like a fragment of the big, still-evolving mystery, and like popping the Gloria Ferrer Blanc de Noirs.

Later we hit a seafood shack in Bodega to take off the chill with hot tea and calamari,

and made it back to watch Season 2, Episode 6.

On Saturday friends plied me with the local pink at our weekends-only neighborhood tapas joint,

She was smiling until she realized she had to be up in four hours to manage the market.

and we strung the party out through Sunday with a farmers market feast.

carrot salad, long beans with pork and chili, eggplant and tomato terrine

cream puffs with buttermilk ice cream and chocolate sauce (the pounding spoon means it's not strawberry)

Thank you, everyone, for the cards, calls, texts, e-mails, lunch, coffee, wine, suppers, chocolate, driving, love, and friendship.  Oh, and books—I got this and this (which, if I haven’t told you, is an hors d’oeuvre to the amazing gift to come in the fall.)  You’re all in my 37-year old heart.

Don’t worry, I’m not starving over here. Lately I’ve had too much writing to write. The less appetizing kind, but it’s bacon. Or butter. Or cheddar, or gravy, or other fatty financial food-phemisms.

Also visitors from afar, strength-sapping injuries, and plain old hot weather laziness. Plus, we’re in summer eating mode. The heat hovers in the kitchen, so you don’t. You slink in for watermelon or a beer, pat the straining refrigerator (I’m sorry, beer and watermelon are heavy, and you’re right, you would still have shelves on your doors if we reasonably limited our Asian condiments, and yes, the chickens do disregard your 12-egg holding capacity,) and retreat to your desk next to the fan or head for the creek or drop down with the dogs and wait for the sun to sink.

Because then a breeze rolls in, and it’s safe to move about, put something on besides underwear, call your friends for dinner. But carefully, as in come over and roll your own summer rolls.  It’s shrewd– there’s no oven to light and they do the work. You set out rice wrappers, rice noodles, tofu and shrimp, and lots of greens and herbs. You mix a little peanut sauce, put some lemongrass pork on the grill, and, to sweeten the deal, brew up some Vietnamese coffee ice cream.

DIY goi cuon

homemade Viet sausage

rollin' and dippin' tute

Y'all. They don't roll themselves.

old friends and new goats

Ana's daily almond fix (birthday version)

They just really like cake.

Glinda the Good Witch pops by for ice cream.

There’s been lots of ice cream lately.  And sorbet. And birthday cake. And tarts with blackberries and boysenberries from the market. And buttermilk panna cotta, one of my favorite lazy desserts, and watermelon with Greek yogurt, my laziest dessert of all. I learned it a few years ago back in the lazy South, from my favorite Southern and totally non-lazy cousin. Seriously simpatico. But buttermilk ice cream is our current house special, the cold creamy cure for the pains and pinings of Summer 09.  Now we’re off to the coast for fried fish and beach time with Gloria, but there will likely be a batch later this weekend, in honor of my new numbah.