May 2016 - OLD LINE PLATE

Mushroom Pie, The Glebe Kitchen

May 25, 2016January 13, 2019

This recipe appeared in “Maryland’s Way,” care of Mrs. Carroll Rede Harding’s “Glebe Kitchen.” Researching The Glebe I learned that a glebe is actually like a church’s home and lands where the priest lives. I always thought it was a person’s name because there’s so many “Glebe” this-or-thats around.

Although Mr. Carroll Rede Harding was in fact the son of a Reverend, the “Glebe” in question is a “typical late 19th century farmhouse” in Talbot County.

Harding mostly grew up in Baltimore, where he delivered hats for a milliner, worked as a copy boy for the Associated Press, and attended

Baltimore Polytechnic Institute. After graduating from Cornell, Mr. Harding worked in railroad industries most of his life, finally serving as the president of the Pullman Company from 1947 through 1958, at which point he retired to the Glebe. He passed away in 1963.

From here, an interesting course of events befalls the Glebe.

The Glebe, Maryland Historical Trust

The estate came into possession of conservative politician Robert Bauman, member of the House of Representatives who lived at The Glebe with his wife Carol and four children.

His career and marriage came to an end following a scandal in 1980 when Bauman was caught soliciting a 16 year old male prostitute. Bauman penned an autobiography in 1986 entitled “The Gentleman from Maryland: The Conscience of a Gay Conservative.”

The Glebe, setting for this turmoil, stands today as part of a million-dollar estate.

But back to the mushroom pie. Although people have been eating mushrooms for ages, its hard for me to pinpoint the 18th and 19th century sources of mushrooms in Maryland. It is doubtful that people were growing them, for the most part. Newspaper searches indicate a fairly-frequent occurrence of foraging gone wrong, if you know what I mean. But then, there would not be much reason to mention successful mushroom hunting.

A lot of mushrooms probably reached Maryland kitchens dried, powdered, or in the form of mushroom ketchup.

Personally, I don’t have the greatest of luck with foraging. I’m not talking unfortunate soul meeting my doom through bad judgement, but rather that I’m usually coming home empty-handed. I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about this so excuse me if I indulge in some food-blogger style rambling.

I’ve just had this lifelong neurotic superstition that maybe I wanted it too bad, or I didn’t give off the right vibes to the universe. Meanwhile my family members were always and still are being rewarded with decent mushroom hauls, or at the very least one gigantic morel the size of a human head. Its an uncanny gift that skipped over me.

An ancestor of mine once found this record-breaking puffball:

This year has been no different. Aside from one blessed morel, I’ve left the woods empty handed.

The woods gods threw me a bone the other day when I found this Sulphur Shelf aka “Chicken Mushroom.” I know this thing doesn’t look edible but do some searching, there’s no mistaking this one. I know because I checked and checked again. A Sulphur Shelf is no spectacular find by most metrics but they grow to a nice size for something requiring a lot of mushrooms, such as mushroom ketchup or this mushroom pie.

Mrs. Carroll Rede Harding’s recipe is open to an array of seasonings, so I copied the flavors of some ravioli I once had and used rosemary and some parmesan cheese. So what if it’s wood pulp or whatever?

I made some quick puff pastry for the top. It may not be picturesque but the pie was delicious. Mrs. Harding suggested serving with roast beef so I did just that, along with some Currant Jelly. I will definitely make this again, woods gods permitting. I pick up litter to win their favor.

Recipe:

2-3 Lb mushrooms
1 large or 2 small chopped onions
2 Tablespoons flour
1 Cup strong stock
.5 Cup Madeira
salt
celery salt or seasonings of choice
freshly ground black pepper
cayenne pepper
butter – 2 tb plus more for sautéing
pastry

Sauté onions in butter until golden, add mushrooms and cook until tender, about 10 minutes. Place mushrooms and onions in pie dish. Brown flour in 2 tablespoons of butter over low heat. Slowly add stock and Madeira wine, stirring or whisking until thickened and smooth. Season to taste. Pour sauce over mushrooms and cover with a rich pastry crust. Bake in a 375° oven for ½ hour*.
“Excellent accompaniment for Roast Beef.” – Mrs. Carroll R. Harding

* If using pastry, follow instructions for baking pastry before reducing heat

Recipe adapted from “Maryland’s Way: The Hammond-Harwood House Cookbook”

Braised Duckling Bigarrade, Fort Cumberland Hotel

May 20, 2016January 13, 2019

This is another recipe from the glamorous hotel era – this time from Cumberland, Maryland. At the time of the publication of “Eat, Drink & Be Merry in Maryland” in the 1930s, Cumberland was a booming town connecting the rest of Maryland to the west, particularly mineral-rich western Maryland, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Trains, the National Road, and the C&O Canal moved freight and people from DC & Baltimore through this mountain town, and many of those people expected to wine and dine in style just as they had in Baltimore and on the train-ride itself.

To that end, the Fort Cumberland Hotel was built in 1916. This “typical small city hotel” offered middle-class residents of western Maryland a chance to feast on Sunday dinners of “Filet of Sole Au Vin Blanc,” “String Beans Au Beurre,” and yes, “Chicken A La Maryland.”

Early advertisements boasted the hotel as “fireproof,” a legitimate concern for the times but amusing and baffling today. The hotel ultimately did experience a fire in 1952 but it was minor, and the Cumberland Times reported that “no panic ensued.”

The Fort Cumberland Hotel was visited by no less than future President Harry Truman during a 1928 journey to dedicate twelve “Madonna of the Trail” monuments along the “National Old Trails Road.”

trumanlibrary.org

Digging into the past of hotel manager Ivan Poling, who shared this recipe with Frederick Phillip Stieff, provides some more damning evidence (if the racist cartoons weren’t enough) on Stieff’s character – if this is the company he kept. A businessman from a family involved in the coal business and then the hotel trade, Poling was the owner or manager of many hotels throughout Maryland and his home state of West Virginia. A news item from Fairmont, WV in 1924 indicates that Poling was almost certainly a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He was fined $500 for his part in a conspiracy to kidnap and batter a black man suspected of making advances on a white woman. Several of the other people charged were “officials” in the Klan. It is unusual that this incident made it into the news at that place and time – there is no way of knowing how he conducted himself thereafter. Upon his death in 1948, Cumberland obituaries recalled his “genial personality and friendly interest in people.”

Today the Fort Cumberland Hotel is a senior’s home. The population of Cumberland peaked in 1940 and has been steadily declining since. Perhaps some of the seniors living there can remember the time when the hotel offered another luxurious stop for the wealthy, and the town of Cumberland was bustling not just with wealthy travelers, but with the chefs and waiters, miners, and factory workers who made their lavish lifestyle possible.

Recipe:

1 duckling
carrots
onion
celery
butter or lard
½ cup currant jelly
stock
2 oranges
1 lemon
flour

Brown whole duckling, along with carrots, onion and celery in a saucepan with lard or butter. Sprinkle with a little flour and cook until the flour is well browned; add some tomato puree and stock, cover the pan and put in moderate oven until the duckling is well done. Remove the duck from the sauce and stir in a cupful of currant jelly and the juice of two oranges and one lemon. Peel strips off of the orange and lemon peel and boil until tender. Add them to gravy, serve over the duck and garnish with quartered orange.

Notes:

Although I adapted these instructions slightly (for legal reasons), they were equally vague in the original. I had no idea how much of anything to use. I got the duck at Potung. There are lots of kinds of duck and the one I bought is probably quite different from those served in Maryland in the early 1900s. This recipe is available online in more decipherable details.

Fricassee of Corn, Elizabeth Ellicott Lea

May 11, 2016January 13, 2019

Though I’ve referenced her book a few times, I have been a bit neglectful in discussing Elizabeth Ellicott Lea, author of one of the oldest Maryland cookbooks.

“Domestic cookery; useful receipts, and hints to young housekeepers” was first published in 1845, with several augmented editions printed in Baltimore in subsequent decades.

In addition to famously providing us the first printed recipe for scrapple, Lea offers her take on some Maryland classics such as terrapin soup, oyster pie and fried chicken.

Elizabeth Ellicott Lea was born in Ellicott City in 1793 into a notable and wealthy Quaker family. Her father, George Ellicott, owned mills on the Patapsco which processed wheat and corn. The historic home she was born in remains intact in Ellicott City.

historical markers, burgersub.org

As an adult, she lived a rural life in Delaware and Maryland, finally settling into a home called Walnut Hill where she wrote the book – often by dictating it to friends while she was bedridden with an unknown illness.

Historian William Woys Weaver has presented his research on Lea in a reprinted edition of “Domestic Cookery” that was published in 1983. Those familiar with Weaver’s work will know that this left me no stones to turn. I can only quote and paraphrase his own words.

“Though her recipes may seem overly plain by today’s standards, rural eating habits before the Civil War were generally simple. Practicality, economy, and simplicity at the table were not new themes in American culinary literature during this period. But in Quaker terms, nothing is as complex as simplicity.” – William Woys Weaver, “A Quaker Woman’s Cookbook”

Walnut Hill, Maryland Historical Trust

Weaver points out that Lea, through her family connections, had a wide social network at her disposal. The recipes and ingredients in her book, intended as a useful guide to her daughter Mary Lea Stabler, and to other newly wedded women, reflects a larger range of influence than the cookery books of other Quaker women. According to Weaver, correspondence between Lea and her daughter “give glimpses into the role food played in the complex world of cousins and other relatives, who thought nothing of sending each other large quantities of produce, meats, or even live lemon trees.”

“The most obvious foods of native origin in ‘Domestic Cookery’ are beans and poke; green corn soup; several squash dishes; terrapin (without the wine and seasonings); all of the pumpkin recipes with the exception of pumpkin preserve; and a number of cornmeal dishes, including some breads and puddings.” – William Woys Weaver, “A Quaker Woman’s Cookbook”

In addition to the recipes, the book contains a percentage of helpful household hints (lifehacks?) that is higher than in my other 19th century cook books. Lea shares folk remedies for ailments ranging from coughs and headaches to a “remarkable” cure for deafness. (There is no miracle lost to time – the patient simply had a massive wax buildup which was loosened with a warm compress). Also included in the book are dyes, polishes, cleaning solutions, instructions for crafting beds and candles, as well as advice on managing servants, raising compassionate children, and more. Also stressed is the importance of charity, with practical suggestions about saving food for the poor, served with a watchword:

One eminent for his charities, near the close of his life, made this remark: ‘What I spent I lost, but what I gave away remains with me.’

With a spirit of thriftiness that a modern-day Lea might appreciate, I used her recipe for “Corn Fricassee” to make the most of some leftover frozen corn that was nearing the end of its useful life.

I did my best to stay restrained in keeping with the spirit of Lea. When I tasted the soup I lost control of my hand and it threw in a dash of Maggi. That’s always happening to me.

Leftovers were served up with a dash of Old Bay, and enjoyed immensely.

Recipe:

“Cut green corn off the cob; put it in a pot, and just cover it with water; let it boil half an hour; mix a spoonful of flour with half a pint of rich milk, pepper,salt, parsley, thyme and a piece of butter; let it boil a few minutes, and take it up in a deep dish. Corn will do to cook in this way when too old to boil on the cob.”

4 cups corn off the cob (or canned/frozen, etc.)
2 cups stock
1 tb flour
.5 pint milk or ½ & ½
1 tb butter
.5 tsp salt (or to taste)
pepper, parsley, thyme to taste

Cover cooked corn with stock and boil for 5 minutes. Stir in flour & milk plus salt and pepper and herbs to taste with a lump of butter. Simmer for a few minutes and serve.

Interview: Jay Fleming

May 4, 2016January 13, 2019

Marylanders love our watermen. They bring us crabs, after all. But for the most part our images of these people have crystallized into an idealized amalgam created from 50-year old photographs, crab-shack signs and stereotypes. The photography of Jay Fleming has been a welcome vehicle to update those images and to ponder the life and labor that goes into putting crab-cakes (and more) onto Maryland tables. If you’re on Facebook you may have seen his frequently-shared photos, capturing moments of the workdays on the water and in the picking-plants, as well as under the sea (or bay as the case may be).

As a wannabe-historian I’m grateful for a window into this part of the food system and the economy of our state (among others).

This body of work is slated for publication this fall in Fleming’s first book “Working the Water.” Coming soon to a coffee table near you. I asked Jay a few questions, thereby creating the opportunity to put some good photography on this blog, for once.

‘Hunting for ducks and geese in the marshes of Dorchester County’

Growing up in Annapolis with a parent working for DNR, Fleming got engaged from an early age with the outdoors through hiking, fishing, and sailing. “Photography gave me a purpose,” he says, “for seeing different parts of the bay and exploring and documenting and sharing that with other people.”

‘A egg bearing female crab crawls across a oyster bar in the shallows near Cape Charles, Virginia’

In 2013, after building an impressive portfolio of commercial and wildlife photography, he focused close-to-home on a project documenting the journey of Chesapeake Bay seafood from the depths of the bay to the processing plants.

“The book is a photographic documentary of the Chesapeake seafood industry and show[s] all the different fisheries that exist on the Chesapeake Bay, the processing of seafood, and the people who are involved in it as well as the natural environment. I’m trying to create an all-encompassing vignette of the seafood industry.”

‘Oyster shucking at a seafood packing house on Virginia’s Northern Neck’

Fleming’s balance of art and documentation recalls the beloved work of Aubrey Bodine and other Sun photographers of the past. But the world shown in Fleming’s photos has changed quite a bit since those analog black-and-white images.

“Documentation of the seafood industry hasn’t been done for a long time and those older pictures inspired me because I’m born and raised in Annapolis, which used to be a huge port for seafood, there used to be quite a few picking houses, oyster shucking houses, and skipjacks used to tie up in Annapolis and now none of that exists and there’s only a handful of watermen that live here.”

‘Working the shorelines of coves and creeks in the Choptank River for oysters ‘

Before embarking on the project, Fleming, like many Marylanders, had misconceptions about what is and isn’t changing in the industry. “If you look at those pictures from the 60’s and 70’s, even the 80’s, you would think that the seafood industry was completely gone. I had a notion that there were very few watermen left on the Chesapeake Bay but I learned that it is still very vibrant and active. In some areas it is the main source of income for a lot of people. Going to the Eastern Shore and seeing these places like Tangier [Island] which are truly working communities you get a sense that [the industry] is alive and… somewhat well.”

Which is to say it’s not an easy life. “For the watermen and people in the packing houses, their way of life is dependent on natural resources and the environment. That stuff is out of anybody’s control. It’s a way of life that’s a lot different than most people are used to.”

In addition to the ever-fluctuating crab populations, watermen have to contend with regulations, which, while aimed at long-term preservation of their industry and the resources it depends on, may sometimes leave career fishermen feeling like they’re subject to extra scrutiny.

Despite this, after some hesitations from wary watermen, he has been welcomed into their workplace. “Ultimately people understood that I was not trying to portray the industry in a negative light and that I was interested in what they were doing, and I’m hoping that my photographs can help people understand local seafood.”

Diamondback terrapin in eel grass

Fleming’s background in wildlife photography shines in photos that offer viewers a rare glimpse into the murky grasses of the bay. We get an up close view of crab neighborhood and grassy boudoir. “Most of my underwater photography on the bay is done between mid-April and the end of May. Once the water tops 65 degrees, algae will start to bloom and reduce water clarity.”

This is not to say the collection doesn’t include photos of the dazzling sunsets over the bay, handsome ships, and bucolic fishing communities.

‘Annapolis crab potter, Brian Walton, picks up crab pots at Hacketts Point near the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.’

“I love so much stuff on the water like these coastal towns like Crisfield and Solomon’s Island. They have so much history involved. The Chesapeake has a lot of shoreline, all these little towns are very different and very unique and all the people are different.”

His favorite Maryland dish? “Soft crabs. I love fried soft crabs.”

“Part of the fun for me is [that] i go to these places and I get to bring back soft crabs, or rockfish, oysters… One of my goals is to help people make that connection with their food and who’s handling it. A lot of people are really disconnected from their food. I enjoy knowing where my food comes from and making that connection. It makes it more meaningful.”

‘A Yellow Lab poses on the stern of a Tilghman Island crab potting boat’

All photos Jay Fleming, http://www.jayflemingphotography.com/

Month: May 2016

Mushroom Pie, The Glebe Kitchen

Braised Duckling Bigarrade, Fort Cumberland Hotel

Fricassee of Corn, Elizabeth Ellicott Lea

Interview: Jay Fleming

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