Chesapeake Bay’s bounty of fish and shellfish amazed and delighted early travelers. Oysters were first among the bay’s wonders, described as “very large and delicate in taste” and thriving in “whole banks and beds.”
The largest genuine Maryland oyster—the veritable bivalve of the Chesapeake...is as large as your open hand. A magnificent, matchless reptile! Hard to swallow? Dangerous? Perhaps to the novice, the dastard. But to the veteran of the raw bar, the man of trained and lusty esophagus, a thing of prolonged and kaleidoscopic flavors, a slow sipping saturnalia, a delirium of joy!
—H. L. Mencken, 1913
