Welcome to “Eating America,” a weekly cross-country culinary road trip. From New Orleans to Nashville to New York City, we explore America’s unique cuisines and hometown favorites through staff interviews, field notes, and delicious recipes. Read on for a chance to win a copy of our new The Complete Cook’s Country TV Show Cookbook.
When you grow up in Maryland, you grow up eating crabs—lots of them.
Test Kitchen Development Manager Brian Runk spent his childhood on the water with his grandparents. He liked to play with tiny minnows he caught with baits of bread, and to go crabbing with his grandmother. His whole family came together on his grandparents’ porch for crab feasts.
“I miss the yellow light and the heat lamps. The boom of lightning and the buzz of big cicadas. The sound of people hammering and cracking crab shells. I learned to do that before I was in kindergarten, how to clean and eat a crab.”
Above: Cook’s Country Maryland Crab Cakes
Seafood is prime on this East Coast state. Skipjacks harvest oyster beds and inspire oyster festivals, where Brian ate them fried, steamed, and raw. He’s nostalgic for rockfish—known as the striped bass anywhere but Maryland—a massive fish his mother stuffed with dill and pickles for Thanksgiving, right alongside the turkey. And don’t forget to put Old Bay seasoning on everything.
Most people recall growing up with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and a cold class of milk. Then again, most people didn’t grow up in Annapolis. Brian’s equivalent of the PBJ?
“Iced tea, sweet as hell, and a white-bread soft crab sandwich, with the legs splayed out the sides like a spider and a tomato right out of the garden.”
Above: Cook’s Country Baltimore Pit Beef
Brian remembers Maryland by the smells of incredible food, like the intoxicating, tangy fragrance of horseradish and grilled pit beef. During his college years he drove the back roads between St. Mary’s County, where he went to school, and Annapolis to visit home. He’d smell the barbecue long before the saw the signs: juicy, rare-pink, paper-thin Pit Beef piled high on rye or a Kaiser roll.
Or Maryland’s prized Silver Queen Corn, a milky sweet corn with tiny kernels. Brian ate it hot or cold, but always fresh, steamed with every meal. Sometimes he could smell it being steamed right from the road.
“It’s like candy, nothing like what they have up here. The corn here is what you’d feed to cows.”
Or the smell of boiling tomatoes, which brings him back to his mother’s kitchen. Tomatoes grow abundantly in Maryland, “by the peck and by the bushel,” so canning is a necessity. Brian’s mother sliced them for dinner every night, with salt and vinegar or just plain, often with chilled cucumbers.
Above: Cook’s Country Smith Island Cake
Maryland will always be Brian’s home—this is a man who once considered getting a tattoo of the Maryland flag—even though he’s spent 15 years in Boston. Brian doesn’t try to replicate Maryland food from New England. After all, it’s a cuisine centered around the climate, the bay seafood, and the produce.
“But I know I’m back when I hear the sounds, see the light, feel the heat, and smell the food.”
Above: Brian (in red) with his son, daughter, brother, and sister (and another brother’s daughters—their dad was out on his boat), at a dock where the Magothy River meets the Chesapeake Bay.
All featured recipes in this post will be free through October 21, 2012.
Last Week’s Contest – The winner of our Regional Favorites: Texan Fare giveaway is Dave, who wrote: “I don’t know if it’s a regional recipe or not, but my mom still makes a molasses cookie recipe she learned by heart at the side of her grandmother, who learned it from her grandmother, who used to sell them to travelers on the stagecoach in the Berkshires. And no, I can’t pass it along—it’s never been written down, just orally handed on to the females in the family as a rite of passage.” Thanks, Dave!
This Week’s Comment Contest Giveaway – What cooking smells bring you back to your childhood?
Let us know in the comments for a chance to win a copy of The Complete Cook’s Country TV Show Cookbook, which includes more than 200 great American recipes like Baltimore Pit Beef and Grilled Corn on the Cob with Chesapeake Bay Butter.
About the Author: Elissa Bernstein
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Fried chicken. That was my favorite meal as a child. Now, I rarely eat fried foods, but they still smell so good.
My mom makes matzo ball soup from scratch a few times a year and it’s a huge production. I love helping her out, but the smell of it simmering all day brings me right back to my childhood when I’d help her chop the veggies.
The smell of anise and baking springele, for me. It makes me think of christmas when I was six years old, the year when we moved into a house and brought all the christmas decorations out of storage. It was the first year in my memory that my mother made springele, and she did it every year after.
Pancakes! Loved having them on the weekends with real maple syrup.
With very rare exceptions, the only person I know who cooked tripe was my mom. On the rare occasions I smell that, I immediately am taken back to the family kitchen.
Anytime I smell garlic and onions cooking in olive oil I immediately go back to my childhood. My mom would make an American take on a Lebanese green bean recipe that my dad’s mother taught her. Now, any recipe I make that starts with warming garlic and onions makes me wish I had a plate of my childhood favorite instead!
For me it’s sauerkraut simmered in apple juice. Despite growing up surrounded by Old Bay and crabs in Maryland and loving it, I can remember vividly the smell of my grandmother’s Thanksgiving sauerkraut overpowering all of the turkey and potatoes, but then she would add apple juice to the pot to cut the bitterness (and the odor). I still love regular sauerkraut, but the sweeter style she made was a childhood favorite and went a little better with sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce.
Biscuits remind me of my mom, and waking up to the smell of her biscuits was always a nice surprise.
The smell of reminds me of my mother turning leftovers into something magical. I’m still not sure how she did it, but she would always manage to turn something bland and boring into something delicious with the addition of that fragrant, tasty sausage.
The smell of *chorizo* (not sure where that word disappeared to in my previous post)
breakfast sausage and scrambled eggs. my mom liked to make breakfast burritos on the weekends. yum!
The smell of Pennsylvania Dutch chicken pot pie reminds me of my Grandma. We allways walked to her house for Friday night dinner, and as my sisters and I ran up the lawn we could smell dinner simmering. Chicken pot pie, brown butter over broccoli, applsauce and cinnamon, pickled red beets, chocolate milk… Those smells remind me of one of my grandma’s feasts!
Caramel. Boy was I addicted to sweets when I was little!
Biscuits and Sausage gravy!
beef and barley soup brings me right to my grandmothers
Cinnamon! it permenated Grandma’s kitchen, the batches after batches of cinnamon rolls and the sweet pickles she canned by the gallon!
My mother made lovely homemade bread – the house would smell so good when we got home from school. We didn’t appreciate it at the time, though – we would always beg for “boughten” bread instead!
Coming home from school and walking in the door smelling an after school treat– Brownies, cookies, 7 layer bars, etc. My mom was a stay at home mom and loved to bake. It was a nice welcome back home again!
The smell of sizzling oil and garlic in a hot wok always makes me think of my parents’ cooking.
Chocolate chip cookies. I don’t think I can remember a lunch growing up that didn’t have a homemade cookie in it, and chocolate chip were my mom’s favorite to make. And even though my husband sometimes pokes a little fun at me, I’m working hard to do the same for my kids with homemade baked treats.