Delaware’s Delicious Food by Ruth Paget
Reading A Culinary History of Southern Delaware: Scrapple, Beach Plums, and Muskrat by Denise Clemons took me back to my Navy wife days in Norfolk (Virginia) when I would gaze at the loamy soiled Delmarva Peninsula across the Chesapeake Bay.
Delmarva is an acronym for Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, which all have a piece of the peninsula. The Delmarva Peninsula devotes itself to natural (organic) produce and chicken and pork raising according to Clemons. Produce, pork, and chicken arrived daily in Norfolk from the Delmarva Peninsula via trucks that took a tunnel under the Chesapeake Bay.
I would buy these items at my beloved supermarkets, Hanaford and Harris-Teeter, to make regional specialties that showed up in the recipe pages of the Virginian-Pilot newspaper that I subscribed to in order to learn about my community.
Clemons lists two recipes in particular that are similar to ones I made when I lived in Norfolk as part of summer harvest cuisine:
-Strawberry-Spinach Salad-
Made with white wine vinegar, lemon juice, olive oil, mustard, baby spinach leaves, strawberry slices, almonds, and crumbled blue cheese
-Watermelon-Feta Salad-
Made with watermelon cubes, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, lemon juice, mint leaves, feta cheese, salt, and pepper
I would make grilled chicken breasts or pork shops and patatas pobres (a Spanish side dish of thinly sliced potatoes fried in olive oil with garlic and seasoned with sea salt and chopped parsley) to go with these salads that I qualified as dessert.
As a wine to go with this meal, I would usually serve a Spanish wine like Marqués de Riscal Sauvignon Blanc or Verdejo. The Delmarva Peninsula has a long history of importing Spanish wine that we benefited from when my family lived in Norfolk.
Based on how my family ate in southern Virginia, I could just as easily say that I lived in Delaware and Maryland as well.
By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
