Smith Island

Frances E. Kitching, the renowned Smith Island cook who began preparing food in her home for linemen installing electricity in the 1950s and ended up operating a world-famed boardinghouse where guests and islanders ate Maryland tidewater cuisine, died of heart failure Wednesday at Genesis Eldercare in Salisbury. She was 84. Mrs. Kitching spent all but three years of her life on her native Smith Island, 10 miles off Crisfield in the Chesapeake Bay, where she was born Frances Evans. What she didn't realize as an 8-year-old learning how to cook -- standing on a box "steering," as she said, bubbling pots on her grandmother's stove -- was that she would become the mental repository of nearly 200 years of family recipes.

These are not "Maryland-style" crab cakes! That's what the online seafood store The Crab Place says about its crab cakes. "Maryland-style uses foreign crab meat to replicate an authentic Maryland crab cake. Maryland-style is found in franchise restaurants across the country. CrabPlace.com crab cakes are 100% real Maryland crab cakes. We are one of the few companies still producing them this way. " It took us a long time to find an online seafood company that handles Maryland-caught blue crabs.

Search crews on Monday recovered the body of a woman, believed to be the victim of a small plane crash over the weekend, from the waters of the Chesapeake Bay, police said. Mary L. Lagerquist, 78, of Sequim, Wash., had been a passenger Sunday in a plane piloted by her son, Lanson C. Ross III, 48, of Fort Washington. Ross told investigators the two-seater, single-engine aircraft lost power and that he was trying to reach Smith Island. Soon after his 3:30 p.m. distress call to Patuxent River Naval Air Station, he crashed into the Chesapeake Bay. The plane sank rapidly, but both Ross and his mother, who was injured in the crash, were able to exit, police said.

In the story about crabmeat, and the obsession diners and resaurants have for 24-7 jumbo lump crabmeat, Spike Gjerde of Woodberry Kitchen said he would love to able to buy packaged crabmeat taken from the whole crab - a single container, in other words that contained claw, backfin and the occasional unbroken lumps. There's not much demand for that, so crabmeat processsors don't provide it. But former Baltimore Sun reporter Tom Horton told me about one place that does. In fact, Rob Kasper wrote about it in 1996.

In one corner of the bare-bones bakery, Louise Clayton, 62, hushed a visitor as she carefully counted out scoops of cocoa for the fudge icing she was making. Missy Tyler, 49, measured out batter and poured it into a cake tin. She did it nine more times before popping the 10 tins into the oven. Donna Smith, 45, placed one cooled thin layer before her and covered it with Clayton's icing. She added layers and icing nine more times until an authentic Smith Island cake sat in front of her. The barely five-month-old Smith Island Baking Co. has 10 employees making Maryland's official state dessert and shipping it across the country.

Smith Island is suffering a disease affecting many other island communities: erosion. When the power of the wind and waves hits, residents of Rhodes Point look out their windows to see whitecaps where there used to be sand. And they worry about their way of life.This community, dating from 1657, is looking for help from the Maryland Port Administration, which must dispose of 100 cubic yards of "spoil" dredged from Baltimore shipping channels over the next 20 years. That material, much of it clean, has to go somewhere, and present sites are fast filling.

Ewell -- FIRST THEY were told to register their cars and trucks, even though they have less than three miles of paved roads to travel.Then they were informed that a public restroom would be built in their midst for the pleasure of the tourists who come to gawk at their homes and boats.And now they are being asked to refer to the lanes where they live by the names on the new street signs the county recently erected.Ah, what price civilization? Today street signs. Tomorrow speed bumps?No more is it just "front road" for the main artery that runs along the waterfront in the largest of three villages on Smith Island.

Hear Dallas Bradshaw of Smith Island recall a bitter cold Christmas of 50 years ago that still warms his heart:There came a freeze-up so bad the whole Chesapeake threatened to ice over. Smith Island, nine miles from the mainland, would soon be cut off.Tylerton, the town where the Bradshaws have lived for the last couple of centuries, was itself islanded from the other communities of Smith by a broad, deep channel -- that was turning as solid as any other town's main street.The ice had forced Dallas' dad and other island men to beach their "drudge boats" where they were oystering, across the bay on the Potomac.

WHEN THE one-room schoolhouse at Tylerton on Smith Island closed last year, it seemed to many residents that their world was coming to an end. For April Tyler, the last teacher at Maryland's last one-room schoolhouse, the world was turned upside down. She was transferred to a middle school in Crisfield, commuting daily from the island. Ms. Tyler had hoped the school board would fund a teaching position for her on the island when classes began in September. Sadly, it was not to be, and in late August, Ms. Tyler and her family left Smith Island.

"An Island Out of Time: A Memoir of Smith Island in the Chesapeake Bay," by Tom Horton. W.W. Norton. 316 pages. $25. Smith Island is a salty world of marsh muck, crabs and terrapins, a world inhabited by watermen and ghosts of centuries past, where independence is tempered by the rhythms of weather and meddling intrusions from the "the mainland." Its 8,000 acres of mostly wetlands face a new millennium in which environmentalists, fickle crabbing seasons and children full of wanderlust may leave the island deserted.

Search crews on Monday recovered the body of a woman, believed to be the victim of a small plane crash over the weekend, from the waters of the Chesapeake Bay, police said. Mary L. Lagerquist, 78, of Sequim, Wash., had been a passenger Sunday in a plane piloted by her son, Lanson C. Ross III, 48, of Fort Washington. Ross told investigators the two-seater, single-engine aircraft lost power and that he was trying to reach Smith Island. Soon after his 3:30 p.m. distress call to Patuxent River Naval Air Station, he crashed into the Chesapeake Bay. The plane sank rapidly, but both Ross and his mother, who was injured in the crash, were able to exit, police said.

I just finished reading an article in a local publication that went as far to name various fishing communities such as "Tangier Island, Smith Island, Crisfield, Cambridge, St. Michaels, Oxford, Kent Island, Rock Hall and others in Bay Country" as being in " the middle of a poaching epidemic of unreal proportions. " The article goes on to describe this problem as being linked to illegal drug use. While some of what the author describes may be true to a much lesser extent, I have grown angered and frustrated by some, but not all, of these so-called journalists leaving the general public with such a negative impression of the watermen community.

Edward Tarter, stopping in at the Harford Road post office in Baltimore, was aghast to hear Wednesday that it might shut down. He understands that the U.S. Postal Service — which is eyeing one in 10 of its locations nationwide for possible closure — is hurting financially. He knows that people are increasingly doing online the business they used to conduct by mail. "But still, you need face to face every once in a while," said Tarter, 64, who lives in nearby Morgan Park.

It was no surprise when Health Magazine rated the Smith Island cake as one of the 50 fattiest foods in the United States. After all, the cake is mostly just a frosting delivery system. In traditional versions, the layers of yellow cake are about as thin as John Waters' mustache. Between these eight to 10 layers is a smear of fudgy frosting; a slice of cake made using the official recipe from the Smith Island Cultural Alliance weighs in at 708 calories and 30 grams of fat. (With some alterations, our made-over recipe yields a slice with 415 calories and 12 grams of fat.)

Nag!, Nag! Nag! Apparently Health Magazine, which called Smith Island Cake one of the nation's 50 fattest foods, wants us to have no fun. Figuring that the summer is a time for travel and indulgent eating, the magazine picked a dish from each of the 50 states that could be bad for you. The choices were high in calories, loaded with fat, or served in gigantic portions. Smith Island Cake, recently named by the legislature as the official Maryland dessert, was the Free State's contribution to the list.

No one ever called Smith Island Cake a health food. But now Health magazine has given the official state dessert a negative dietary superlative that may be outsized even for this multilayer chocolate creation. Health calls the cake Maryland's contribution to the Nation's 50 Fattiest Foods. Its 26 grams of fat make it worse than bacon-wrapped meatloaf in Alabama (17 grams of fat) but not as bad as Eskimo Ice Cream made from frozen animal fat in Alaska (91 grams of fat). The cake is named for the only inhabited island in the Chesapeake Bay and, as the magazine notes, "became so popular the governor signed the cake into law."

In one corner of the bare-bones bakery, Louise Clayton, 62, hushed a visitor as she carefully counted out scoops of cocoa for the fudge icing she was making. Missy Tyler, 49, measured out batter and poured it into a cake tin. She did it nine more times before popping the 10 tins into the oven. Donna Smith, 45, placed one cooled thin layer before her and covered it with Clayton's icing. She added layers and icing nine more times until an authentic Smith Island cake sat in front of her. The barely five-month-old Smith Island Baking Co. has 10 employees making Maryland's official state dessert and shipping it across the country.