The truth hurts. Clawingly so.
Last week, the ever-enthusiastic and shamelessly boosterish governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, declared that our beloved blue crab, our long-enjoyed and delicious Maryland delicacy, is not a native species of the Old Line State. Please tell me it isn’t so.
Unfortunately, Governor McAuliffe, spoke knowledgeably. And that’s distasteful in itself.
This is what I learned last week in The Washington Post and The Baltimore Sun. So much for discounting the accuracy of these newspapers. Other news just seems secondary to this disturbing revelation.
So, what’s the genesis of the blue crab?
According to a marine scientist at the College of William & Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences, all crabs begin their lives as larvae in the lower Chesapeake because they thrive early at birth only in the Bay’s salty waters—in Virginia. And, to add insult to injury, a marine scientist at Maryland’s Chesapeake Biological Laboratory at Solomon’s Island confirmed that all mother crabs release their offspring in, yes, Virginia.
In a wonderfully funny editorial in The Baltimore Sun, a mother crab, true to her Maryland roots, discloses to her children that “It’s where your father and I met and had a wonderful rapturous experience in the marsh grass in the Miles River near St. Michaels on a glorious day last summer. (Where he is now I couldn’t say, but I understand he’s regarded as a Number 1—as he still is my book.”
This very same Mother Crab, unable to hide the truth from her offspring (and us readers), reveals that, like her sisters, she journeyed south to the salty environs of the lower Chesapeake Bay.
In the early 1900s, Maryland and Virginia engaged in the infamous oyster wars. In recent years, our state repeatedly loses out to our southern neighbor when it comes to enticing industry to our shores. And, of course, Virginia proudly—sometimes annoyingly so—brags about having produced four U.S. presidents.
Again, the truth hurts. Soulfully so.
As a true blue Marylander, I won’t give up on claiming the blue crab as one of our own. After all, where do most choose to live, even if ever so briefly? How about Maryland crab soup? Maryland crabcakes? Virginia has no such notable brand, no such close identity to this delectable crustacean.
Where do so many friends and family members gather to eat crabs, along with delicious tomatoes and corn on the cob, and drink beer—much to the amusement of non-Marylanders—but in our small but productive state? And, as the The Baltimore Sun related, Old Bay Seasoning is a Maryland product used and liked worldwide.
Like the oyster, far less plentiful these days than was true 50 years ago, our blue crab provides an undeniable identity to our seafood-crazed state. It provides a social and cultural bond, an annual rite of passage that motivates people to forsake eating utensils and dig in with vigor and good cheer. It’s hard for me to imagine that Virginians would take the same joy and joie de vivre to celebrate the goodness of the blue crab as we hearty Marylanders do in good harvests and bad.
It’s been many years since I read William Warner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Beautiful Swimmers, translation for callinectes sapidus, Latin and Greek for the blue crab, which changes its color to red when steamed. Warner wrote about colorful watermen from Smith and Tangier islands to Kent Island. As Tom Horton, well-known writer and author, wrote about Beautiful Swimmers on June 1, 2007, in the Washingtonian, “It was a biological, historical, and sociological gem: an elegantly wrought, scientifically accurate portrait of a culture that existed all around us. He paid equal tribute to crabber and crab.”
Though I don’t pretend to know Virginia as well as I know Maryland, I feast on the former’s incredible history, the larger-than-life men it produced like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, on frequent trips to Williamsburg. I even dare to order a crabcake in Colonial Williamsburg. It cannot compare to the ones I’ve eaten in our state.
Virginia’s exuberant governor clearly struck a nerve. Truth does that sometimes. Nonetheless, the blue crab is ours.
As the fictional Mother Crab writes her offspring in the humorous The Baltimore Sun editorial, “You can aspire to be the best Chesapeake Bay blue crab that you can be, which, as everyone knows, is a Maryland crab.”
Now, Gov. McAuliffe, take that when you next eat Maryland crab soup, or stop in Maryland for a crabcake on your way to your childhood home in Syracuse, NY.
Columnist Howard Freedlander retired in 2011 as Deputy State Treasurer of the State of Maryland. Previously, he was the executive officer of the Maryland National Guard. He also served as community editor for Chesapeake Publishing, lastly at the Queen Anne’s Record-Observer. In retirement, Howard serves on the boards of several non-profits on the Eastern Shore, Annapolis and Philadelphia.
joe diamond says
That place where they dredge crabs all winter? They stopped doing in about five years ago because they had been doing is so long they couldn’t find many crabs to dredge in winter………so they stopped. Then they blamed Maryland for failure to reduce Rockfish. Saying Maryland rockfish eat the young crabs explains away the dredging……..That Virginia???
They may have produced four presidents but Maryland still has her own Vice President for awhile Spiro Agnew:
“Three things have been difficult to tame: the oceans, fools and women.
We may soon be able to tame the oceans;
fools and women will take a little longer”…………….and much more. Quality trumps quantity!
Let Virginia try to to top our own Edgar Allen Poe in word production; tintinnabulation does not come out of a crab dredge in winter!
Besides, here in Maryland we consume only the red crabs for gustatory reasons. They are ripe and mature. Down the Bay in Virginia no amount of seasoning will hide the bite of a mouthful of a blue crab.