After all of that cookbook genealogy last week I need a little rest so here’s a crab recipe from “My Favorite Maryland Recipes.” Many people who may not be familiar with the Tawes name were made so recently when Maryland’s current governor elected to attend the J. Millard Tawes Crab & Clam Bake instead of the Republican Convention.
In all honesty this dish was just okay. Crab custard was winning a lot of recipe contests in the 1960s and a lot of those recipes were more seasoned than this. I recommend more mustard powder, Old Bay or hot sauce.
Mr. & Mrs. J Millard Tawes, Maryland State Archives
I will add a little bit of filler in the form of clippings showing the long-standing tension between Maryland’s and Virginia’s natural resource management strategies. It seems that Maryland had long been begging Virginia to enact a law against harvesting female crabs with their eggs, aka “sponge crab.”
Daily Times, Salisbury, 1944
Star-Democrat, Easton, 1951
Daily Times, Salisbury, 1962
As you can see, the resentment simmered for decades.
Virginia finally did pass such a law in 2010.
Recipe:
1 Lb crab meat
2 eggs, beaten
1.5 Cup milk
.25 Teaspoon mustard powder
salt
pepper, black
butter
Beat eggs and add milk, mustard, salt and pepper to taste. Gently stir in crab meat. Place in a buttered casserole and dot with butter. Bake at 325° about 20 minutes, or until set.
Recipe adapted from “My Favorite Maryland Recipes”
This is another entry laden with tedious detective work, my unrestrained fanaticism ruining any possibility of ever attracting repeat readers.
I’ll try to keep it brief.
According to “The American Magazine and Historical Chronicle“, 1987, “famed Baltimore hostess, Mrs. B.C. Howard, compiled the earliest charity cookbook published in Maryland, Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen’(Baltimore, 1873).” Certainly, “50 years” is one of the more famous and important of Maryland cookbooks.
A few months ago, in my quest to print-on-demand every Maryland cookbook in the public domain, I found a lesser-known Maryland cookbook entitled “Queen of the Kitchen,” written by a mysterious “Miss Tyson” or “M. L. Tyson” in 1870. The name of course resonated but Tyson is no Paca, Howard or even Pratt – not as unquestionably Maryland upper-crust.
“Queen of the Kitchen” certainly disseminated around Maryland. Some of the recipes in “Maryland’s Way” came from different Marylanders’ personal copies of the book.
When I began to enter the recipes into my database I noticed something – many of the recipes were strikingly similar to recipes in “Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen.” Copying recipes into new cookbooks hardly qualified as plagiarism at the time. It was rampant. Still, it is pretty interesting to see the source of so many recipes from Mrs. B.C. Howard’s book!
Howard may have owned a copy of the book, or she may have known Tyson and they both sourced the recipes from common friends or from each-other.
So… who was M. L. Tyson?
Apparently “Queen of the Kitchen” was a cookbook by a Baltimore woman, published to raise money to build an Episcopal church in Oakland Maryland. Kind of random but… ok.
By researching the church I was able to determine that M.L. Tyson was Mary Lloyd Tyson, born in 1843. And she was indeed Maryland upper-crust. Mary Tyson’s mother was none other than Rebecca Ann Key, cousin of Francis Scott Key. Her father, physician and planner Alexander H. Tyson was Rebecca’s second husband. According to accounts, Rebecca Ann Key was a stunning woman.
“What was she, you will ask—she was no Queen or Goddess—she represented
no character in Shakespeare—neither was she attired in any costume as a
princess—she was herself only and as herself dressed in some white
material familiar to you ladies, but unknown to me. She paraded through
those rooms—crowded with all the beauty of this city of beauties—the
acknowledged Queen of the Night—not that she received more attention,
but she elicited the most admiration.” – “Some Account of Mr. and Mrs. Cohen’s Fancy Ball,” MDHS Underbelly blog
It’s agonized me that I could not find her portrait.
Dr. William Howard’s home, Charles and Franklin Street, (loc.gov)
So anyway, Rebecca’s FIRST husband was William Howard. William was Benjamin Howard’s brother. Basically, Mrs. B.C. Howard and M.L. Tyson were related, and certainly knew one-another.
What’s more, Mary Tyson’s half brother, William Key Howard, married a woman named Clara Haxall Randolph in 1860. Clara was Mary Randolph’s niece. How about that!
There’s a few other asides. Pretty much all of the people involved were Confederate sympathizers – William Key served in the war. Here is his picture:
Mary’s younger sister Nannie married an actor named Robert Lee Keeling. He was twenty years younger than her. Future mayor James H. Preston (I made his corn pone) was an usher at their wedding. The marriage quickly soured. Robert Lee Keeling went on to become a celebrated painter of miniature portraits.
When “Queen of the Kitchen” was published, Mary Lloyd Tyson was a single woman of 27. She was likely not the female head of her household as her mother was still alive. (As opposed to Mrs. B.C. Howard who was 72 when her book was published.)
I think the Tyson’s lived here, on the 500 block of Park Avenue (loc.gov)
Mary Tyson became Mrs. George Tucker in 1875. The Tuckers resided in Virginia. Both Rebecca Ann Key and Mary’s sister Nannie spent their final days there, and Mary herself passed away in 1908.
I made Tyson’s macaroons – what would today be called ‘macarons’. This is not one of the recipes that Howard reprinted, although she did use a second macaroon recipe, with slight adjustments. The Tysons lived in Baltimore city, not far from Belvidere at all. Especially considering that M.L. Tyson was not the head of her household at the time of the books publication, the families might have shared receipts.
I don’t have a good way to finish this post but if you’ve made it this far, what does it matter? These cookies were delicious for the record.
I’ve been gradually getting to “know” Elizabeth Ellicott Lea a little better, and coming to really like her.
At first her no-frills thrift seemed unexciting and maybe even a little stern. Certainly she doesn’t radiate the Maryland pride of other authors who boast their Maryland-ness in the titles of their cookbooks. Lea was a Quaker first and foremost, and a Marylander by chance. But thrift as an ethos suits me well, and more and more I’ve come to trust Lea with what to do with seasonal ingredients and simple comforts, like home-baked bread.
I recently chose her recipe for “French Rolls” to make some grilled sandwiches with.
I’m no bread expert, so I’m not sure what makes these rolls “French.” A recipe in the Maryland Gazette in 1831 -14 years before Lea’s book- bears little resemblance to Lea’s method.
Lea offers ample general advice on baking bread, “the most important article of food” by her estimation.
“It is significant to note that within the context of the broader regional culture in which Elizabeth Lea lived, there was a large class of poor whites and blacks who depended upon hearth baking [in a dutch oven] as their sole source of bread. It is interesting that Lea’s recipe took this into account, because very few period cookbooks, American or British, devote much space to it. “Baking in dirt,” as some Welsh cooks characterize it (the pot is covered with ashes), was generally considered primitive by the 1840s and an unappetizing way to go about the business of bread baking, regardless of the delightful ‘hearthy’ flavor.” – William Woys Weaver, “A Quaker Woman’s Cookbook: The “Domestic Cookery” of Elizabeth Ellicott Lea”
Lea’s tips on rising, testing stove heat, using a dutch oven or a brick oven, etc. may be somewhat useful to a hearth cook but I can’t say for sure what her yeast would’ve been like. The 1831 recipe in the Gazette suggested ‘distillers yeast’ or ‘ale yeast’, brewing being just as common an activity as baking. Lea has advice on making the yeast from hops, corn flour, potatoes, or milk. Hop yeast is declared best.
I also can’t claim to know what her flour would have been like. Let’s be real here – Maryland is corn country. Although once home to many mills, the types of wheat that grow well in Maryland are not what we would pass off as bread flour today. According to Lynne Hoot from The Maryland Grain Producers Association, “Maryland grows soft red winter wheat which is not a good bread flour, it is used more for cookies, pretzels and pastry.”
Frederick Town Herald 1832
This may have differed slightly in the past, as flour had not been industrialized to the uniform consistency we now know.
“Millers produced a variety of flours depending upon the moisture in the grain, its quality, starch and gluten content, and the fineness of the grinding. Typically the miller blended various types of wheat to produce a particular product. Mills yielded several grades of flour. The best or most pure was the pastry white, followed by white, then seconds, thirds, and middlings. The bran, which was the husk of the grain, and the pollard, or the part of the wheat next to the husk, were discarded or fed to animals.“ – Tillers of the Soil: A History of Agriculture in Mid-Maryland, Paula S. Reed, 2011
Maryland was home to dozens of grist mills, and millers created their own blends that varied from mill to mill.
Milling regions, “A Guide to Patapsco Valley Mill Sites”
James Walter Peirce 2004. Each section hosted 5-10 mills. About a fifth were grist mills.
Before transportation brought in large-scale competition from the midwest, Maryland’s rivers were dotted with mills, including Elizabeth Lea’s family’s mill. Many ruins remain along the banks of the Patapsco, or have been reduced to the innumerable algae-covered bricks that can be found in the riverbed.
“Most of our wheat for harvest is double cropped with soybeans so we get 3 crops in 2 years. Corn, winter wheat, short season soybeans, a cover crop and then year 2, back to corn. Our production acreage is about 250,000 acres and about 18 million bushels. We grow a lot more wheat as a cover crop but that is not harvested, it is simply used for environmental protection to take up any remaining nutrients left from the previous crop (and mineralized from crop residue left on the field), and to protect the soil from erosion.”
Curious how the most uncompromising of local-food evangelists deal with this, I reached out to Woodberry Kitchen. Much like in Lea’s time, the bakers compensate with blends that vary based on what is available.
“We are indeed using quite a bit of local flour, thanks to the incredible work of a few farmers. Heinz Thomet at Next Step Produce in Charles County, MD is growing a number of varieties of wheat, as well as barley, rye, sorghum, buckwheat, and rice. He has a German made Haussler 20” stone mill that he uses to mill flour for us. Omar Beiler in Kinzer, PA is the other significant source of flour for us. He grows heritage varieties of wheat, as well as emmer, einkorn, and some heritage varieties of corn. We get our corn products from him, as well as our whole wheat flour and a “T-85” or high extraction flour. He has an Austrian made Ostiroller 20″ stone mill. Our last local source is Small Valley Milling; they specialize in spelt and we get our whole and white spelt flours from them.” – Russell Trimmer, bread baker at Woodberry Kitchen
Luckily for the buying public, their spelt bread is -bafflingly- not gross.
Maryland newspaper ad, 1944
As anyone who bakes bread is aware, this type of baking requires a level of intuition that is hard to comprehend in the age of industrialized flour. But according to some, we have been paying a price for consistency.
“Before the advent of industrial agriculture, Americans enjoyed a wide range of regional flours milled from equally diverse wheats, which in turn could be used to make breads that were astonishingly flavorful and nutritious. For nearly a century, however, America has grown wheat tailored to an industrial system designed to produce nutrient-poor flour and insipid, spongy breads soaked in preservatives. For the sake of profit and expediency, we forfeited pleasure and health” – Ferris Jabr, “Bread Is Broken” New York Times 2015
Lea advises that “coarse brown flour or middlings makes very sweet light bread, by putting in scalded corn meal, say, to two loaves, half a pint, and is also good to use for breakfast made as buckwheat cakes…” For some recipes she recommends saleratus, a baking-soda precursor.
Her french rolls recipe (as I attempted it) turned out lovely, and took relatively little effort. Most importantly, it helped us get further acquainted when she asserted “there is nothing in any department of cooking that gives more satisfaction to a young housekeeper than to have accomplished what is called good baking.”
Recipe:
“To one quart of sweet milk, boiled and cooled, half a pound of butter, half a tea-cup of yeast, a little salt, and flour enough to make a soft dough; beat up the milk, butter and yeast in the middle of the flour; let it stand till light, in a warm place; then work it up with the whites of two eggs, beaten light; let it rise again, then mould out into long rolls; let them stand on the board or table, to lighten, an hour or two, then grease your pans and bake in an oven or stove.”
Mix yeast with a small amount of the milk and let sit until creamy and bubbly. Combine remaining milk, butter, yeast, salt and about half the flour and stir until ingredients are moistened. Add more flour and continue stirring until dough forms a rubbery ball that is sticky but not wet – pulls away from the bowl like gum. If using a mixer, start with the beater, switch to the hook to add flour and watch for the dough to pull away from the sides of the bowl.
Form into a ball, leave covered in a greased bowl until doubled – about 1 hour in summer temperatures.
Work the egg whites into the dough as you knead it down again, kneading for a few minutes. Return to the bowl for a second rise.
Remove from bowl and beat down into a ball – divide into half, then quarters, etc. until you have the desired number and size of rolls or loaves.
Bake at 350° until it is golden brown and sounds hollow when tapped. I have no idea how long that is. I have stopped timing my baking because I am a champ I guess. Don’t worry, it’ll backfire.
While vacationing in 2015, on a day drive down the Delmarva peninsula, we found ourselves in the relatively sparse landscape of Bloxom, VA. We spotted a striped truck off of Route 13 with stenciled letters announcing “Mi Pequeña Taqueria” and pulled over into the scorching parking lot where this taco truck stood. We enjoyed classic tacos filled with meltingly tender tongue or smoky pork prepared ‘al pastor’, and topped with a modest sprinkling of diced tomato and onions. Optional hot sauce waited at the picnic table. This taco truck and the syndicated Spanish-language radio station we listened to were the only indications of another side of the Eastern Shore.
Every summer, droves of people pass to and from the beaches and beach towns, crowding into the narrow slices of paradise in an attempt to squeeze the most joy out of summer vacation days. Off of the back roads is a hidden workforce for whom summer means the opposite of vacation. Summer means crops to be harvested, one after another: strawberries, beans, tomatoes, fruit – first down South and then further North as the climate ripens crop after crop.
As I did research on Strawberries for this post and the previous strawberry post, I was struck by the transience, the true impermanence of this workforce. Whereas immigrant groups have been known to come for the labor, weaving new traditions into local culture, and some people settling down to become a permanent part of it, farm labor is so seasonal and isolated that some of us may hardly know that thousands of people are living nearby.
In our region, it seems pretty glaring that the economic predecessor to this work force was slavery.
After emancipation, the system of labor migration fell into place. In some instances, employers were even caught re-enslaving their “employees.” Involuntary servitude cases occur to this day.
An 1891 Baltimore Sun article described the life of strawberry pickers living in the “farm barracks”:
“About ten thousand men, women and children, armed with cooking utensils and bed clothing, have just invaded Anne Arundel county. Here they will remain until the last vestige of the season’s crop of berries, peas and beans have disappeared… The strawberry pickers are recruited from the neighborhoods about the packing-houses in Baltimore, and they are of almost every nationality. Bohemians, Poles and Germans predominate, with a fair sprinkling of Americans, Italians and colored people.
The barracks where the pickers live while on the farms vary according to the means of the farmer and the size of the patch… often they are simply old tenant houses… The life is as near gypsy-like as anything can be. The first thing done is to build a fireplace of mud in the open air, which is used in common by all the pickers.” – Army of Harvesters, The Sun May 27, 1891
Despite describing the sparse sleeping quarters where workers “sleep close” sometimes even sleeping outside, plus the long hours, and the watchful eyes of the “row boss” ensuring they don’t “eat as many berries as they pick,” the article depicts the situation as a fun “summer vacation” for the workers.
In 1900 the Sun reported that hundreds of African-Americans from the Eastern shore flocked to the strawberry-picking jobs in Anne Arundel County and then in Delaware. This was the height of the strawberry boom and there were not enough laborers to go around.
The labor shortage didn’t last long, however, and job competition may have fueled a spate of terrorism in 1937, as black laborers’ cabins in Somerset County were mysteriously burned to the ground. Several people were killed, and although a coroner’s jury ruled the fires an accident, the State’s Attorney was on record suspecting foul play. The Sun pointed out that even accidental fires should have merited scrutiny of the housing conditions.
Shortly after, an ample labor source came from WWII “prisoners of war.” A few of the camps were later used to house migrant workers.
The state created a commission to tackle the issues of housing and healthcare for the large force of migrant workers in Maryland. Their reports offer at least some insight into the demographics of workers and their lives in labor camps.
The commission reported in 1983 that of the 57 licensed migrant camps in Maryland “more than a third experienced major deficiencies in meeting established health and safety standards.” Westover was a particularly infamous large camp in Somerset County:
“The Westover Camp, once a World War II holding pen for German prisoners, has acquired such notoriety that migrants from as far away as Texas refuse to stay there… Families live in single-room units without running water. Most units have refrigerators and small gas plates for cooking; sometimes doors, sometimes not. Latrines offer stools without stalls, gang showers with no privacy… ditches filled with stagnant water and.. gaping bins of garbage…” – Migrant Workers on Maryland’s Eastern Shore (1983)
In 2014, public health official Thurka Sangaramoorthy reported on her blog that she was “astonished” at the camp’s cleanliness and upkeep, considering its past reputation.
Sangaramoorthy’s website offers a more recent look into the humanitarian issues that still exist in some of Maryland’s labor camps.
While the workforce is now comprised largely of people of Mexican origin, there have been varying percentages of African-American, Haitian, Guatemalan, and Puerto Rican people making up significant numbers of workers over the years. Workers keep to each-other and their families, and travel too frequently to leave many obvious signs of influence on local culture. Aside from the occasional taco truck spotting, many Marylanders have no awareness about this aspect of our economy. And yet most of us partake in it- at the grocery store, the produce stand, and yes, when we eat those ‘fancy’ tacos on the way home from the beach.
Recipe:
1 Pint sharp vinegar
5 Quart strawberry
1 Lb brown sugar
“1 pint sharp vinegar poured on 1 quart of strawberries, to remain 24 hours. Then strain it on a second quart of fruit, and so on until you get the extract from 5 quarts of strawberries; add to it, 1 pound of brown sugar. Then boil and keep skimmed; then let it cool before bottling it. Cork it tightly and keep it in a cool place.Extract of raspberries may be made in the same way.”
Recipe from “The Queen of the Kitchen: a collection of “old Maryland” family receipts for cooking” by M. L Tyson
“Effective October 1, 2008, the Smith Island Cake became the State Dessert of Maryland (Chapters 164 & 165, Acts of 2008; Code General Provisions Article, sec. 7-313). Traditionally, the cake consists of eight to ten layers of yellow cake with chocolate frosting between each layer and slathered over the whole. However, many variations have evolved, both in the flavors for frosting and the cake itself” – Maryland Manual On-line
I confess to being a onetime Smith Island Cake skeptic. When the layer-cake was declared the state dessert in 2008 I was baffled. What of the white potato pie? Or Lady Baltimore? (Not a Maryland cake by the way. Shame on me.) And then, in my haste to try this famed cake, I ordered up a slice at one of the many restaurants along Route 50 boasting the dessert. Hoping to lure in tourists on their way to or from the beach, many such establishments scrambled to procure some form of “Smith Island Cake.” I was disappointed by nine dry, lifeless layers, probably straight from Sysco, foe of all that is authentic.
I was missing the point of the Smith Island Cake Act. This cake wasn’t coronated to reign above all other Maryland desserts and to add a token “must try” to diners’ lists for corporations to cash in on. This is about more than cake. It is about recognizing a unique place and culture in our state.
Many Marylanders have, unbeknownst to us, had Smith Islanders to thank for our soft crabs and crab cakes, dishes widely known and ‘owned’ from the shore up through the panhandle. When you eliminate the clams, crabs, oysters, and fish that comprise the seafood-centric sustenance of Smith Islanders, what is left to distill into an emblem of tradition and the meticulousness of skilled island cooks is Smith Island Cake.
It is hard to pin down the cake’s origin from newspapers or books. The name “Smith Island Cake” is a relatively recent convention, and the number of layers varies and bloats through the ages. Some early news-writers mention trying the famous “seven layer cakes” of Smith Island. Layers eight, nine and ten have been slapped on in the last 20 years or so, with authority enough that many would scoff at seven layers today.
Mrs. J. Millard (Helen Avalynne) Tawes’ “My Favorite Maryland Recipes” features a seven-layer cake with a cake and chocolate icing composition that is nearly identical to available recipes for Smith Island Cake. Tawes grew up in Crisfield, the closest town on the mainland, a departure point for ferries to the Ewell community on Smith Island.
My 1981 copy of “Mrs. Kitching’s Smith Island Cookbook” does not include the recipe for the cake – it was added by popular demand to later editions in the 1990′s. According to “Ethnic American Food Today: A Cultural Encyclopedia” (2015, Lucy Long), “many incorrectly credited the late island hostess, innkeeper and cookbook author Frances Kitching with the cake’s appearance. She helped popularize it with the thousands of guests she served at her home and boarding house…“ This account claims that the thin layers were the result of a primitive wood oven in which it was hard to get a larger layer to rise properly.
Others maintain that the large icing ratio helped to preserve the cake for longer. The rising fame of the cake only serves to further confuse the cake’s true origin or ‘purpose’ – as if a cake ever needed a purpose.
At the risk of incurring the wrath of purists everywhere, I used Kitching’s recipe for the cake layers to make two miniature layer cakes, and swapped out a cream-cheese icing. I gave my tiny cakes a patriotic flair with food coloring, and I did a characteristically incompetent job of icing them. Nonetheless, the cakes were a hit; moist soft layers held together with a thin slathering of icing.
Smith Island Cake, Bayside Inn
In 2015 I visited the island. After a 30-minute breezy ferry ride to the Ewell community, we watched a video of a resident swiftly and expertly picking crabs for packing. I inquired into Mrs. Kitching’s old place – it had long since burned down. We strolled the streets for awhile. They resembled a sleepy Eastern Shore fishing community, but due to population (and land) loss it was even quieter. Occasional boat motors buzzed like cars on a distant highway, cicadas sang nearby. I was surprised to see pomegranate trees surviving the climate. Biting flies terrorized us, distracting from the picturesque calm summer day. We retreated indoors to Bayside Inn to finish our visit with a soft crab sandwich and yes, a slice of Smith Island Cake. I chose the “Peaches and Cream” variety. It was the best slice of cake I have ever tasted.
Recipe:
2 cups sugar
2 sticks unsalted butter, cut into chunks (1 cup)
5 eggs
3 cups flour
¼ teaspoon salt
1 heaping teaspoon baking powder
1 cup evaporated milk
2 teaspoons vanilla
½ cup water
Cream together sugar and butter. Add eggs one at a time
and beat until smooth. Sift together flour, salt, and baking
powder. Mix into egg mixture one cup at a time. With mixer
running, slowly pour in the evaporated milk, then the vanilla
and water. Mix just until uniform.
Put three serving spoonfuls of batter in each of ten 9-inch
lightly greased pans, using the back of the spoon to spread evenly. Bake three layers at a time
on the middle rack of the oven at 350° for 8 minutes. A layer is done when you hold it near your
ear and you don’t hear it sizzle.
Start making the icing when the first layers go in the oven. Put the cake together as the layers
are finished. Let layers cool a couple of minutes in the pans. Run a spatula around the edge of
the pan and ease the layer out of the pan. Don’t worry if it tears; no one will notice when the
cake is finished. Use two and three serving spoonfuls of icing between each layer.
Cover the top and sides of the cake with the rest of the icing. Push icing that runs onto the plate
back onto the cake.
