The Chesapeake Bay

The Chesapeake is a drowned river valley, the estuary of the Susquehanna and its sister rivers, where fresh water from the north meets the Atlantic through a mouth between the Virginia capes. Its shores divide between Maryland and Virginia, with the Eastern Shore, a peninsula shared with Delaware, lying across the water from the western mainland. John Egerton places the Tidewater among the founding regions of Southern eating, a country of water, farms and plantations whose tables were set largely from what the bay and its rivers gave.

The bay's cooking begins with brackish water, and with the creatures that thrive in it: the eastern oyster, Crassostrea virginica, the blue crab, Callinectes sapidus, and fish that run in from the sea or up from the bay in season, among them striped bass, Morone saxatilis, and shad, Alosa sapidissima. The genus name Callinectes is Greek, meaning beautiful swimmer, and the animal is the centre of the bay's table: steamed hard with salt and spice, picked for crab cakes, simmered in soups, or eaten soft after the moult. Egerton's Southern Food treats the Tidewater as a place where the sea and the farm met on one table, so that seafood sat beside ham, poultry, corn and garden vegetables rather than apart from them. The oyster was the bay's great staple and its great loss. Oysters were eaten raw, roasted, stewed and fried, and shipped inland in barrels, and the work of tonging and dredging them supported whole communities of watermen on both shores. Over the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries heavy harvest, disease and degraded water thinned the reefs, and the oyster's place in the daily diet shrank accordingly. The cook who works with bay oysters today inherits a diminished but living tradition, and treats them with the plainness their briny, salt-sweet character asks for. The crab, by contrast, remains the bay's signature, and its handling is exact. A good crab cake is lump meat held together with the least binder the cook can manage, seasoned lightly and cooked until the surface colours, so that the sweetness of the crab is the whole of the flavour. Hard crabs are steamed over vinegar and beer with a heavy coat of spice, then eaten at a paper-covered table with a mallet and knife, a slow meal that is as much occasion as dinner. Soft-shell crabs, taken at the moult and eaten whole, are dusted and fried or sautéed in butter, and mark the start of the warm season. Beyond shellfish, the bay's table belongs to the wider Tidewater: shad and its roe in spring, rockfish baked or broiled, country ham from the Virginia side, and the corn, tomatoes and greens of the farms behind the shore. The cooks who made this food in great houses and cabins alike included enslaved Africans and their descendants, whose skill carried the region's cooking, and Egerton insists on that debt in his account of the South. The Chesapeake is therefore both a water and a household tradition, in which the catch is brought to the kitchen and the kitchen answers with restraint.

The flavour of the bay is salt and sweetness held in balance: the briny clean taste of the oyster, the sweet, faintly mineral meat of the blue crab, and the milder richness of rockfish and shad. Seasoning on the hard crab is assertive, with salt, pepper and spice on the shell, while the meat inside is meant to taste of itself. The cook who respects the bay keeps butter, heat and binder in check so that the water is still present in the finished dish.