No, Weirddave, they missed 2 facts;
Where is the proper recipe for MCS? It sounds fantastic, I’ve never had it, and I want to make it!
As I stated above, Mike, it DON’T call fer no canned tomatoes! Hey, you showed me the finer points of beer drinking in Chicago, if’n you come to the Bay area, I’d be happy to toss back a Clipper City with you over two bowls of MCS.
(Thanks for showing up, Dave 
sorry all the pseudo-science stuff happened before you found a parking space.
bbeaty, it is obvious that you are a student of science. Your understanding of the nature of science is sound. However, you must admit that simply putting a dish of milk on the back stoop with the control in the frigde is not a good experiment. As Roger Brinner says, “The plural of anecdote is not data.”
Perhaps a better experiment would to put the multiple dishes of milk on the porch during a thunderstorm and do this multiple times. As a control, the same number of dishes should be left out for the same amount of time on as many nonstormy days (with roughly the same temperatures and, if possilble, overcast conditions.) Now with the multiple samples and high N, a simple two-tailed T test can be run to see if there is a significant difference in the rates of congealing.
Better still, the experiment should be run during many different days, with temperature, humidity, windspeed, etc. measured for a quick covariate analysis.
As our letter writer seemed to miss, simply trying to be scientific doesn’t make a true experiment.
At the risk of turning this into a scientist quotation duel, let me quote Carl Sagan
If you have evidence that thunderstorms cause crab soup to go sour (or bad), I’m sure we’d all like to hear it. The milk debate is all very intersting, but irrelevant.
DOH!!!
<roseanneroseannadanna>Never mind.</roseanneroseannadanna>
<< Maryland Crab Soup dosen’t contain any milk. >>
Heck, crabs being non-mammals, even Maryland crabs themselves don’t contain milk… let alone soup.
They do contain mustard, though. 
Not wanting to get into the middle of a New England Clam Chowder-type “tomato/no tomato” nuclear war here, but when I put “Maryland crab soup recipe” into Google, this is what came up on Page 1.
These are billed as “Maryland Crab Soup” with or without the word “Authentic”. They have tomatoes or tomato sauce as well as other vegetables like carrots, corn, and green beans.
http://www.recipesource.com/soups/soups/22/rec2229.html
http://www.recipesource.com/soups/soups/21/rec2167.html
http://www.souprecipe.com/AZ/ldByRMrylndCrbSp.asp
http://recipe-appetizer.com/25/140674.shtml
This one is billed as, "The is the real stuff. Genuine Maryland crab soup, direct from the Chesapeake Bay area. " It has tomato and veggies.
http://www.souprecipe.com/az/MarylandCrabSoup.asp
These two are billed as “Maryland Cream of Crab Soup”, not “Maryland Crab Soup”. They’re just basically cream sauce with crabmeat in it.
http://www.recipexchange.com/recipe_display.cfm?ID=697
And I actually found a semi-plausible explanation for the “sour/curdle during lightning storms” tale:
Both “Maryland Cream of Crab Soup” recipes note:
So, you’re in the kitchen, making cream of crab soup, a big lightning storm comes up, you’re distracted, you let the soup boil, and it curdles. And then you associate “lightning” with “soup curdling”, and the next time you see lightning on the horizon and there’s Cream of Crab Soup on the table, you say, “Better hurry up and eat that or else the lightning will make it curdle.”
Cream of Crab is quiet different from Maryland Crab…it’s kind of like comparing New England Clam Chowder to Manhattan Clam Chowder. 
So, I don’t know if that’s a valid argument. It is an interesting theory though.
I didn’t read the posted recipe too closely, and was imagining something like “cream of crab” soup.
Anyhow… if the experiment from New Scientist never works when others try it, then the milk/thunderstorm is probably just an old wives tale… and the interesting topic shifts to the mutation of legends. I wonder if the milk/thunderstorm rumor led to the MCS/thunderstorm rumor, or were they entirely separate?
On the other hand, if exposing a glass of milk to thunderstorms always reliably separates the milk into curds within a few minutes, some reality intrudes into the rumor mill.
And Spritle, IF the original experiment is easily reproduced, then it’s an excellent experiment. It’s a Michael-Faraday type of thing: you don’t even need any measurements to reveal the phenomenon. It’s like hearing a report in 1819 that if you put a compass near a current-carrying wire, the compass needle deflects. When we hear about such a thing, should we 1. declare it’s a bad experiment and insinuate that it’s a mere anecdote, or 2. go out and try to reproduce the effect?
As for #2, I still haven’t tried subjecting a cold glass of milk to 100KV pulses, or to UV light from big sparks…
Yes, there is Cream of Crab, which is a cream-based soup, and then there is Maryland Crab, which is a tomato-based soup (no milk), and like deegemd said, it’s like New England and Manhatten clam chowders.
The Old Wive’s Tale I’ve always heard is that it doesn’t matter if you’re finishing making the soup or if you’re eating it when the storm starts, it’s if the storm starts when you’re still making it. Something to do with barometric pressures and cold fronts and the relative humidy and whatnot.
I know I’ve seen it disproven as a weather-related human interest story on local news channels every year, but of course I have no cites.