Eating in Maryland
A small portion of your crabs at a feast
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A crab feast primer
A quick review of crab-eating technique can be useful: To open the crab, flip it upside-down and look for the long "lever" on the belly. Get your finger under it and pull to pry the shell open, revealing the meat and guts inside. Most are too squeamish to eat the greenish guts and grayish gills, but a true Marylander eats all of the crab. (And doesn't everyone anyway when eating soft shells?) You'll be given a small wooden hammer to crack the legs to get at the meat, but you can also just give them a good bite to break the shell. Enjoy!
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Local Maryland cuisine is as richly exotic. Unfortunately, it's also under-appreciated or over-fished, and therefore can sometimes be hard to find.
Without a doubt, the state is known first for its Maryland Blue Crabs, fished from the Chesapeake Bay, served in magnificent quantities, drenched in Old Bay (a peppery mix of celery salt, bay leaf, mustard seed, black and red pepper, cinnamon, and ginger), accompanied by copious amounts of beer, and a total, wonderful mess. The blue crab, symbol of the state, adorns drivers licenses and other state paraphernalia, and is a considerable source of state pride—all the more disappointing that over-fishing and farm run-off into the bay have decimated the local blue crab population, greatly limiting the fishing haul, and meaning that you are eating crabs from somewhere else unless you caught them yourself. The no less magnificent crab feasts continue, though, along and around the Bay in small crab shacks and in restaurants around Annapolis and Baltimore, and throughout the Chesapeake Bay region.
Soft Shell Blue Crabs, another Maryland staple, are available throughout the world in fine restaurants as a high class delicacy; here they're everyday bar food in the summer. The Chesapeake Blue Crabs are a bit of a natural freak, crabs that "molt" annually as they outgrow their shells. The shells grow back, but smart fishermen don't give them a chance. Don't worry about how to eat these crabs—just open your mouth and start biting, and eat it all. And there's a real pleasure to eating a "delicacy" on a hamburger bun with some lettuce, mustard, and tomato, while taking a shady respite from the summer sun, by the beach or otherwise.
Further along the Maryland line of crab cuisine is the crab cake, which comes in many varieties. You can find them anywhere in the state, at any American restaurant. But quality varies wildly, and most will leave you thinking, "well, I would have rather just had the crab." For the undisputed best, which Maxim rated one of the top 10 dishes in the world, go to standing-room-only Faidley's in Baltimore's Lexington Market and order a pair of jumbo lumps.
Aside from crabs, shellfish in general are a classic cornerstone of Maryland cuisine, (no surprise, given "Chesapeake" is Algonquian for "Great Shellfish Bay") and raw oysters on the half shell are a local delicacy. They're typically appreciated with a dash of hot sauce, and clams are often served the same way. Steamed mussels can make for a warming winter evening dinner, and Bertha's in Baltimore serves the state's most famous (and tastiest) mussel.
From here, the cuisine gets stranger and harder to locate: Maryland Fried Chicken? Say what? Yes, fried chicken is a Maryland specialty, and you'll find countless places in Kentucky touting the stuff. It's basically just your garden variety fried chicken, but smothered in creamy gravy. You're unlikely to find it really anywhere, but try looking along US-50 towards Ocean City for unassuming shacks bearing "Chicken" signs. If you just want some good chicken, head to a Royal Farms gas station, which, for reasons beyond anyone's understanding, serves up fine fried chicken (if you get it fresh out of the oven, that is).
The most esoteric Maryland dishes range from roasted terrapin to fried muskrat to roasted eel to boiled raccoon. Good luck finding these, though. Again, Faidley's in Baltimore is a good place to look, although these wildly rare dishes are only available there seasonally. Hopefully top local chefs will come to their senses and start cooking upscale variations on these interesting local dishes, and realize that the Italian-French-American fine dining you can find in any city throughout the country is a little uninventive.
Lastly, there are several Mid-Atlantic foods worth looking for, mostly in diners. A slice of scrapple for breakfast is a fried delicious must, despite its origins (pig organs and scraps), which do terrify the uninitiated and the cowardly.
The Most Frequently Asked Travel Questions about Maryland
