>Trying to find grits in Maryland is a losing battle.
Well, the Elkton Diner has those too.
It was already established in an earlier post that scrapple isn’t a Southern food. It’s apparently a German food that spread from Pennsylvania to Maryland (to whatever extent it exists here, and I’m not convinced of that). The KKK isn’t particularly Southern either. The link given shows that it exists in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Iowa, and Nebraska. I’ve never personally seen any evidence that it exists in Maryland, but if it does, that proves nothing.
The evidence that people are giving about the supposed Southern qualities of Maryland seem to be about the existence of majority-white working-class communities with young males who think that they’re rebels. They display Confederate decals not to show their Southern origins but to show what rebellious jerks they are. Some people seem to think that all the North is like the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It’s not. Much more of it is like where I grew up in rural Northwestern Ohio. I was just in Frederick a week ago and I noticed how much Western Maryland looked like where I grew up. The only difference is the Western Maryland has somewhat more of a big-city feel than rural Northwestern Ohio. If you wanted to, you could drive fifty miles from Frederick and be in Baltimore or Washington. If you drove fifty miles from where I grew up, you could be in . . . um . . . Toledo?