Month: March 2017

Spiced Carrot Soup

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In an attempt to jump-start the camping season, we headed to Green Ridge last weekend. The March weather opened up just enough time for two nights of campfire life, with a long walk on the C & O Canal and of course a hearty campfire dinner one night.

I found a lot of great recipes in “At the Hearth: Early American Recipes” by Mary Sue Pagan Latini, a hearth cook who demonstrated at the “Baltimore’s City Life Museums’” 1840 House, and the 1812 Flag House.

The Flag House still exists as the Star-Spangled Banner Flag House but sadly the 1840 house closed in 1997 and is now a bed & breakfast.

The City Life Museums encompassed the Phoenix Shot Tower, Carroll Mansion, H. L. Mencken House, Fava Fruit Company, Brewer’s Park, and the John Hutchinson House (a.k.a. The 1840 House.) Hutchinson was a wheelwright who lived in the home from 1835 to 1840 with his wife, three children, two boarders and an African American servant. Reenactors presented scripted dramas in different rooms of the house, providing visitors with a glimpse of the daily life and concerns during this tumultuous time in Baltimore.

Originally from Arkansas,
Latini got into hearth cooking after retiring from the Naval Academy. While
volunteering at the 1840 house she learned about hearth cooking – and taught
others in turn.

In addition to recipes, her
book offers some hearth cooking tips and some background on the Colonial
American diet. I’ve earmarked several recipes for future camp trips.

For once I didn’t cop-out and
use the little enameled dutch oven, and instead used my cast iron, and the
tripod. The afternoon offered a reminder of how laborious and slow of a process
cooking once was – how much effort was spent lifting, sweating and waiting.
Still, there is something calming and meditative about cooking over a fire or a
hearth.  And there is an extra relaxing
sigh of relief when you can sit back afterwards and watch while the fire lives
on, and not have to worry about controlling it.

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Recipe:

  • 2 tablespoons butter
  • 1 large onion, finely chopped
  • several sprigs of thyme
  • 4 medium sized potatoes, diced
  • ½ teaspoon pepper sauce (I did not have this so I used some
    jalapenos I diced up and put in in vinegar the night before)
  • 12 carrots, finely diced
  • 6 cups soup stock
  • 2 bay leaves
  • ½ teaspoon sugar
  • 2 Cups milk
  • 1 cup cream
  • ½ teaspoon salt
  • Black pepper

Melt the butter in large pot hung from a crane or tripod. Saute
the onion in butter and then add the diced potatoes, carrots, stock, and bay
leaves. Cook until the vegetables are tender. Add cream, milk, thyme, pepper
sauce, sugar, salt, and pepper and heat to boiling*. Remove the bay leaves
before serving.

*The milk might curdle especially with the
vinegar! It still tastes good but you can prevent it if you’re finicky.

Recipe adapted from
“At the Hearth: Early American Recipes” by Mary Sue Pagan Latini

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Hey man I said it’s a long, slow process.

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Baltimore’s Black Chefs and Caterers, part 1

“The French chef has been tried in the south, but, except in a few rare instances, they have failed to satisfy the peculiar demands of the southern epicure or even of the tourist who, coming south, expects dishes peculiarly southern… The demand for capable colored cooks is greater than the supply.” – The Afro-American, December 1915

In June 1913, a squad of policemen were called into the Emerson Hotel for special duty. They stood watch as the French kitchen staff of the Emerson were informed that their services were no longer required. Head Chef Joseph Sarri and his staff muttered curses in French as Eli Jones, “grinning nervously and advancing rather cautiously, was led into the presence of the haughty Frenchman and introduced.” The chefs handed over their aprons and their kitchen tools to an all-black staff.

The Sun was rapturous. “Real old Maryland cooking has triumphed!” they wrote.

Emerson manager John J. Kincaid stated things more cynically. “We simply had to get negro cooks to keep our patronage,” he explained. “People were getting tired of coming to the South, the land of good, old-fashioned eating, to run across French cooking. When they come here and ask for ‘chicken, Maryland style,’ or for terrapin or oysters they want these dishes prepared by the cooks who know how. French cooks might do pretty well for New York — but for Baltimore, never.”

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Chesapeake Room at the Emerson Hotel

Still, the Sun continued to gloat a week later, this time in poem form. In a parody of Poe’s “The Raven,” they wrote:

“Joseph Sarri, expert Frenchman,
with his band of Gallic henchmen,
‘got the can,’ while stalwart bluecoats guarded well the kitchen door.
‘Joe’ had served up Paris dishes,
but this did not meet the wishes
of the Emerson’s best patrons, visitors to Baltimore.
So the sons of Gaul departed
dignified, yet broken-hearted
and since then the dark-skinned Eli and his band have held the floor.”

Although the fetish for black cooks was reaching new heights at this time, Baltimore’s dining scene had depended heavily on African-Americans from the beginning.

Cooking and catering provided a rare opportunity for Baltimore’s black citizens to enjoy some of the benefits of the city’s culinary fame.

Caterer John R. Young had been serving the city’s well-to-do since before 1900, at the Elkridge Hunt Club, Filon’s restaurant at Light & Redwood (née German) Streets, and countless luncheons, weddings, and banquets. All of his advertisements mention his specialty – terrapin, but there are other accounts of dinners he catered which highlight his mutton, turkey, Chicken a la Maryland and Oysters a la Newberg.

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1907 advertisement, Maryland Medical Journal

When Young died of pneumonia in 1920, the original Sun obituary reduced his lifelong accomplishments to the fact that “many white persons who had known and had enjoyed the meals he prepared were present” at his funeral.

A later eulogy did a little better. “He was a scientist, an artist, and an alchemist,” the Sun wrote. “It was John Young who first made a culinary poem of the diamond-back terrapin: and the chicken that came to John Young’s kitchen to be fried came out not as a martyr, but as one blessed among chickens.”

Young was born in Tappahannock, VA, and moved to Baltimore at age 17 and became a waiter. He was a head waiter at the Hotel Rennert before moving on to work at several of Baltimore’s elite clubs such as the Anthenaeum and the Elkridge Hunt Club.

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Athenaeum Club, Charles & Franklin Streets, Baltimore, loc.gov

Eventually, he branched out to commence catering out of his home on Richmond Street (possibly now Read street.)

His reputation reached so far and wide that he was shipping diamondback terrapin to Chicago and New York. The latter Sun eulogy wrote that he was being mourned in Chicago, New York, and Baltimore and that “when the news gets to Paris and London he will be mourned there.”

Though the Sun attempted to honor Young by emphasizing how white funeral attendees “of place and position” mourned his passing for love of his cooking, we can hope that more than a few of them mourned him also as a friend.

Meanwhile, over at the Emerson, fickle management had a change of heart. In 1922 they summarily dismissed the black kitchen staff (though they kept the waitstaff.) The move was explained away by crediting “efficiency experts” and cost-saving measures. The hotel created segregated locker rooms for the kitchen staff. (In 1926 they hired Charles Bitterli – more about him on this post.)

Baltimore was still a city with a world-famous dining reputation, and there would be caterers who would follow in Young’s footsteps, gaining prosperity, independence, and fame and admiration not unlike the era of celebrity chefs we know of today….

(to be continued…)

“California Salad”

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In 1916, Still Pond Methodist Church on the Eastern Shore produced a church cookbook entitled “The Eastern Shore Cookbook of Maryland Recipes.” You can see that once again a community cookbook made sure to put the state’s culinary fame front and center.

And why not? Certainly the cuisine that was drawing tourists to Maryland’s luxurious hotel restaurants had bubbled up over time from humble regional kitchens.

So how did a “California” salad make its way into a book of Eastern Shore recipes? The recipe was contributed by Benjamin S. Haywood, a Methodist Reverend who visited the church at least once in his extensive travels.

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Los Angeles Times, 1901

Born in Indiana in 1866, Haywood was living in Riverside, California by 1901. He traveled on missions to Puerto Rico and Mexico. According to a 1901 profile in the Los Angeles times, he used a novel approach to raise funds to hire a teacher for a school in Orizaba, Mexico. He contacted friends in the United States and encouraged them to quit smoking and to divert their savings to the school fund. A teacher was hired, and presumably Haywood’s friends gained some longevity.

I was drawn to this recipe because I love citrus salads in winter. Not only are many citrus fruits in-season at this time of year, but the vitamin C they contain gives me the illusion of enhanced immunity to whatever cold is going around at any given moment. Many of the greens and herbs that go well in these salads are also C-rich. I was unable to find a Bermuda onion, but red onion with navel orange and the tangy cooked dressing is a better match than you might think. A slice of avocado on top would be a nice addition.

This salad recipe got me thinking about ways that food culture was disseminated in an age before newspaper or internet recipes. Traveling clergy like Haywood could leave a lasting influence on the food shared among parishioners. With the publication of a cookbook, ideas could be spread further throughout the community and perhaps beyond – into the hands of readers who were looking for a taste of Maryland fare.

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Recipe:

Oranges, Bermuda onions. Slice oranges and onions, placing one slice of onion between two of the oranges, in a sandwich form. Put this on lettuce leaves. Over all pour a cooked dressing.

Dressing:

Yolks of four eggs, beat very light, four tablespoons of sugar, one and one-half tablespoons of flour, one teaspoon of salt, one-half teaspoon of mustard, three-quarters cup of vinegar, one-quarter cup of water. Cook in a double boiler until thick and add one tablespoon of butter when taken from the fire. Mix with cream when used.

Recipes from “The Eastern Shore Cook Book of Maryland Recipes”, both contributed by B. S. Haywood

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Red Devil’s Cake

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I found this rare little church cookbook at the Kelmscott Bookshop a few months ago. It’s got a bunch of old photographs and a brief history of a town in Maryland right on the Pennsylvania border, Bentley Springs.

“On October 4, 1837, the Baltimore and Susquehanna Railroad obtained a right-of-way from William Dorsey and leveled a path through the valley for its rails… Mr. Charles W. Bentley and Ann O., his wife, appreciating the healthful location and charming natural scenery, purchased it from Talbot Denmead… and named it Bentley Springs. It was found to possess waters of great medicinal value and was visited by hundreds every summer, until it obtained an extensive reputation as a summer resort.
The Bentleys, apparently with unlimited resources [built]… a large hotel that contained forty rooms with lavish appointments and a courtyard paved with blocks of marble…” – Bentley Springs History and Favorite Recipes

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Boarding House

I couldn’t find much else about Bentley Springs aside from the information in the recipe book. Much of the town was built around supplying food and labor to the hotel. A church was built in the 1870s along with several mills that employed the townspeople.

When the hotel burned down, the boarding house (pictured above) was built in its place and the Bentleys moved away.

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Like many mill towns built around the railroad boom, Bentley Springs went into a bit of decline in the automobile age. One of the paper mills burned down, followed by the beloved town store a few years later.

Despite this, the recipe book assures us, “the pleasures were many”: children playing in the snow and swimming holes, church picnics, fishing and trapping. Emphasized above all is the natural beauty, wildflowers, rocky hills and babbling brooks. The kind of scenery that makes me excited for spring.

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This cake recipe was contributed to the book by “Eliza V. Smith,” who sadly does not appear in any of the photos of townspeople. A few of the same photos printed in the cookbook can be found on this site.

I believe that “Red Devil’s Cake” and the now ubiquitous Red Velvet Cake are essentially the same thing. Recipes for Red Devil’s Cake appeared in newspapers across the country in the 1920s and 1930s. The original red color of these cakes was caused by a reaction between the cocoa and the acidic sour milk. Modern cocoa tends to be Dutch processed and this reaction is a thing of the past. Most Red Velvet Cake recipes now involve red food coloring.

My cake beautification skills are pretty pitiful as you can see, but I enjoyed this moist cake with some buttercream frosting.
I’d imagine that Eliza’s Red Devil’s Cake would have been made with pride and care and brought along to one of the many picnics and revivals centered around “this little stone church in the wilderness.”

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Recipe:

  • 2 Cups cake flour
  • 1.25 Teaspoon baking soda
  • .24 Teaspoon salt
  • .5 Cup butter
  • 1 Cup sugar
  • 2 egg
  • 2 square chocolate
  • 1 Teaspoon vanilla extract
  • .75 Cup sour milk
  • .333 Cup boiling water

1. Sift, then measure flour. Sift three times with soda and salt.
2. Cream butter until light and lemon colored. Add sugar gradually, beating after each addition until light and fluffy.
3. Slowly add the eggs which have been beaten until they are almost stiff as whipped cream. Gradually add the chocolate which has been melted and cooled.
4. Stir the vanilla into the milk. Alternately add the dry ingredients and the milk, beating until smooth after each addition. Add the boiling water and beat well.
5. Turn into greased cake pan and bake.
6. Frost, let cake stand for two hours before cutting to allow red color to develop.
Amount: 2 8 inch layers
Temperature 350° for 25-30 minutes.

Recipe from “Bentley Springs: Our History and Favorite Recipes”

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Stewed Macaroni, Mrs. Charles H. Gibson

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In 1894, Mrs. Charles H. Gibson, like Miss. Mary Lloyd Tyson and Mrs. Benjamin Chew Howard before her, got in on the trend of releasing a cookbook to share and boast her renowned hostessing and housekeeping skills. Like those other books “Mrs. Charles H. Gibson’s Maryland and Virginia Cookbook” capitalized on the fame of Chesapeake cooking.

“In placing my book before the public I feel that I have a right to claim a like indulgence to those who, before me, have given to the world the benefit of their experience, and I feel confident that my “Cook Book,” being the result of an experience of twenty years, will meet with a just reward.“ – Preface, “Mrs. Charles H. Gibson’s Maryland and Virginia Cookbook”

Mrs. Charles H. Gibson was born Marietta Fauntleroy Powell in 1838 in Middleburg, Virginia. According to a profile in “The Midland Monthly,” she was educated in Richmond “where she was a great belle.” Describing her as a renowned housekeeper and hostess, the 1896 profile gushes that Mrs. Gibson had written “one of the best cook books extant.”

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“The Midland Monthly,” 1896

Around 1858, Marietta married Richard Carmichael Hollyday and moved to his manor in Talbot County, an estate known as Ratcliffe. Hollyday had inherited the mansion from his father Henry, the second son of the senior Henry Hollyday, who had built the Georgian home around 1749 on a tract of land originally bequeathed to Robert Morris by Oliver or Richard Cromwell.

Ratcliffe Manor sits on the Tred Avon River not far from Easton. Although books about colonial architecture always mention that the house is not particularly large, they go on to fawn over its beauty. Swepson Earle wrote in “Maryland’s Colonial Eastern Shore”: “‘Ratcliffe Manor House’ is more distinguished in appearance than the majority of homes built at the same period. The rooms are capacious, the ceilings high, and the quaintly carved woodwork delights the connoisseur of the colonial.”

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Ratcliffe Manor, photo by Swepson Earle

“Colonial Mansions of Maryland and Delaware” by John Martin Hammond (1914) describes “an air of comfort and good taste”, with a living room opening to a terraced garden. “To the left of the front door as you enter, is a little office, or study, wherein the master of the plantation in the old days interviewed his overseer and attended to the many small details of management of the place.”

We are fortunate to have a rare alternative view into life at Ratcliffe Manor care of William Green, who had been enslaved at a neighboring farm, escaped to freedom in 1840 and wrote a memoir in 1853. Green singled out Henry Hollyday as a representative of the brutal plantation conditions of the Eastern Shore at that time, with accounts of cruelty, overwork and neglect of the clothing and feeding of the people he enslaved at Ratcliffe.

As the second-born son, the young Henry Hollyday is said to have inherited the Ratcliffe estate due to the irresponsibility of his elder brother Thomas.
In the revocation of the original will, their father wrote “the conduct and deportment of my son Thomas… has been and still continues to be such as has given the greatest anxiety and grief.”

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Ratcliffe Manor Dairy Complex, Maryland Historical Trust

The estate passed from ‘the good son’ Henry on to his own son Richard, Marietta’s first husband.

When Richard passed away in 1885, Marietta Hollyday became the owner of Ratcliffe. It remained her home even after she married former U.S. Senator Charles Hopper Gibson in 1888; he moved there with her. Gibson died in 1900 and Marietta sold the home in 1905. She died in 1914. I can’t figure out where she was living at that time.

The recipe I made from her book is a classic example of 1800s recipe confusion. Break the macaroni? I’d like to see an example of what macaroni looked like in the 1890s that it had to be broken into pieces. The whole thing about straining the sauce was a little weird – maybe this would be to remove fibrous tomato pieces? I used canned tomatoes. No specific cheese was called for so I used Parmesan because that’s what I had. When making old recipes it is helpful to remember that the original cooks might not have had a lot of options themselves.

I’ll wrap up this post with an assurance from John Martin Hammond, dismissive of the harsh realities of Eastern Shore plantation life, and unfazed by the drama of the wayward son:

“Ratcliffe Manor has no ghosts and no stories of violent death or suicide. It speaks simply of gentility and good living.”

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Reidsville Review, NC, 1892

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Recipe:

  • macaroni
  • .5 Lb beef
  • 1 minced onion
  • 1 Pint    tomatoes, peeled and sliced
  • 1 piece butter
  • pepper, black
  • salt
  • grated cheese

Break the macaroni into inch lengths; stew twenty minutes, or till tender. Have the following sauce ready : Cut half a pound of beef into strips, and stew half an hour in cold water. Then add a minced onion and one pint tomatoes, peeled and sliced. Boil an hour and strain through a cullender after taking out the meat. The sauce should be well boiled down by this time. One pint is sufficient for a large dish of maca-
roni. Return the liquid to the saucepan; add a large piece of butter, pepper and salt, and stew till ready to dish the macaroni. Drain this well ; sprinkle lightly with salt and heap it in a dish. Pour the tomato sauce over it. Cover and let it stand in a warm place ten minutes before sending to table. Send grated cheese around with it.    

Recipe from “Mrs. Charles H. Gibson’s Maryland and Virginia Cookbook”

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