August 2017 - OLD LINE PLATE

Stuffed Eggplant, Gerald W. Johnson

August 31, 2017January 12, 2019

“To say that [Baltimore] is an ugly city is to give an altogether false impression, for ugliness ordinarily is construed as a negative quality, the absence of beauty. The astounding, the incredible, the downright fabulous ugliness of Baltimore, on the other hand, is distinctively a positive quality. The amazed newcomer to the city is almost persuaded that she studied ugliness, practiced it long and toilsomely, made a philosophy of ugliness and raised it to a fine art, so that in the end it has become a work of genius more fascinating than spick-and-span tidiness could ever be.” – Gerald W. Johnson, Century Magazine, 1928

Gerald W. Johnson has a brief biography written before the first of his two recipe contributions to “Eat Drink and Be Merry in Maryland,” in which he is noted as a biographer of Andrew Jackson and John Randolph of Roanoke. Nearly 100 years later, Johnson is more remembered for his outspoken liberal (for the time) opinions than by these works.

Born in North Carolina in 1890, he moved to Baltimore in 1926 and remained here for the rest of his life, writing for the Evening Sun in addition to many national publications. Johnson reflected on national politics from a Southern perspective, but also on Maryland issues – upon his arrival, he wrote, he was surprised to see the Taney statue; “in a respectable city I should as soon expected to find a statue of Beelzebub.” Johnson spent many of his years in Maryland at a home on 1310 Bolton Street. He had more recently been living in Towson when he died in 1980.

From the vantage of this Union state just below the Mason-Dixon line, Johnson famously criticized the South and the glorification of a war that had been lost because “God Almighty had decreed that slavery had to go.”

According to biographer Vincent Fitzpatrick:

“In Johnson’s published assessments, the Agrarians had a flawed vision of Southern history; they gloried in a storybook past that existed only in their own minds. Moreover, he thought them sheltered from the more unattractive aspects of contemporary Southern life. He recognized that they were highly literate, patriotic, and well-intentioned, but he found them a dangerous foe that needed to be vanquished. The Agrarians, in turn, saw Johnson as a flaming liberal, a Menckenite, and a turncoat, now living with the enemy, whose criticism profaned his native land.” – Gerald W. Johnson: From Southern Liberal to National Conscience, Vincent Fitzpatrick

Frederick Phillip Steiff promoted this romanticized view of Southern sensibility in “Eat, Drink & Be Merry in Maryland.” Nonetheless, he proudly included Johnson’s recipes for “Stuffed Eggplant” and “Artichokes from Armenia” along with the short bio of Johnson. The two men possibly met through connections at the Hamilton Street Club, which is said to have been the nexus of Johnson’s Baltimore social life.

Gerald W. Johnson’s writings stand in contrast to his friend and Sun paper colleague H.L. Mencken. Johnson wrote with a fair share of outrage, but a sense of optimism in a time when social change appeared to be underway. In 1965, he wrote:

“The historical significance of this republic is simply that it affords men an opportunity to learn how to be free, unhampered by the bonds that Church and State have laid upon the generations of the past; but every rational man knows that the heaviest bonds of Church and State were not as weighty as the gyves locked upon our wrists by passion, prejudice, ignorance, and superstition.”

Despite Gerald W. Johnson’s tirades against inequality, Fitzpatrick points out that Johnson still paradoxically defended segregation and was known as a “liberal segregationist.” Again: there are no heroes in history. Johnson’s writing attempted to turn an eye on the contradictions of society – many of which we are still grappling with today.

Recipe:

eggplant
salt
Ground meat (esp lamb)
small amount cooked rice
Seeded raisins
Black pepper
breadcrumbs
butter

Remove the stem from the eggplant and cut it in half lengthwise. Boil in salted water until the meaty inside of the eggplant is tender enough to be scooped out with a spoon, (about fifteen minutes). Mix the scooped out eggplant with ground meat, preferably lamb (*I seasoned my lamb with ras el hanout and it was great), a small amount of cooked rice, some seeded raisins and salt and pepper to taste. Pack the mixture back into the shell, and place in a greased baking dish. Sprinkle with breadcrumbs and dot with butter, and bake at 375° for fifteen minutes, or until the top is lightly browned. (Maybe stick it under the broiler for a few seconds for a more dramatic effect.)

Recipe Adapted from “Eat, Drink & Be Merry in Maryland”

Fresh Garden Corn Chowder, Ivy Neck

August 23, 2017January 12, 2019

This rich corn soup is not unlike Elizabeth Ellicott Lea’s Corn Fricassee. The flavor of the corn is front and center (or, depending on your palate and your corn, the soup is bland).

The attribution in “Maryland’s Way” is “Mrs. Murray’s Bride’s Book, 1858.“ It is possible the recipe is to be found somewhere within the voluminous Cheston-Galloway papers at the Maryland Historical Society. The collection encompasses many descendants of Samuel Galloway, a Maryland merchant and slave trader in the 1700s.

Galloway owned an estate, Tulip Hill, in Anne Arundel County. His son James Cheston would build Ivy Neck nearby on the Rhode River in 1787. The homes remained within their large and tangled family tree for many generations.

Ivy Neck, Maryland Historical Trust

Mrs. Murray was born Mary Hollingsworth Morris somewhere down that family tree, at an intersection of cousins Anne Cheston and Dr. Caspar Morris. Tracing family connections demonstrates the many ties between Baltimore and Philadelphia families, and Philly is where the Morris family resided before settling at Ivy Neck, on the Rhode River in Anne Arundel County.

Morris family Philadelphia home, The Morris family of Philadelphia

In 1844 the Morrises signed documents to gradually manumit all of the people that they had enslaved there. Four years later, Dr. Morris wrote a biography of abolitionist Margaret Mercer, an Anne Arundel County neighbor who worked with the controversial American Colonization Society.

In Dr. Morris’ biography, he credits Mercer with influencing another local enslaver, Daniel Murray Esquire, to release his slaves. Murray then joined the efforts of the Colonization Society. There is still a county in Liberia named Maryland, a vestige of this attempt to “resettle” people who had in most cases become naturalized to North American culture and terrain.

Ivy Neck photo showing outbuildings, E.H. Pickering, loc.gov

It was Murray’s son, Henry M. Murray, who married Mary Hollingsworth Morris in 1856. The family lived at Ivy Neck, perhaps with Mary’s “bride’s book,” but also with the help of servants, many of whom were probably the same people manumitted by Mary’s parents. The Ivy Neck property has two different tenant houses, one of which was home to a man named Daniel Boston who cooked for the Murray’s daughter Cornelia and her family at Ivy Neck in the 1930s.

The house at Ivy Neck burned down in 1944, and part of the property eventually went to the Smithsonian Chesapeake Bay Center for Environmental Studies.
Well, there you have it, “Fresh Garden Corn Chowder.”

Recipe:

6 ears fresh corn
6 cups milk
3 egg yolks
3 Tablespoons butter
1.5 Teaspoons salt
1.5 Teaspoons sugar
white pepper
chives
paprika

Shuck corn and remove silk, then grate corn off the cob into the soup pot; add milk and heat slowly. Beat egg yolks and work the soft butter into them; add a little of the hot corn and milk mixture to egg and butter, beating well; then stir this into the soup. Add salt, sugar and a dash of pepper and bring to a simmer. Serve hot with chopped chives and paprika.

Recipe adapted from “Maryland’s Way”, “Mrs. Murray’s Bride’s Book, 1858”

Silver Cake

August 15, 2017January 12, 2019

I’ve never really been a “cake person.” For baking and eating, my memories tend to reside in the pie zone.

Then last year, when I graduated from reading the published canon of Maryland cookbooks on to the special collections at Maryland Historical Society, I began to notice a high ratio of cake recipes in personal cookery books. As I spent hour after hour poring over these old manuscripts (sometimes procrastinating on a lunch break – that didn’t help), I eventually started to feel like I was as intrigued by all of these cakes as the women who’d collected them.

But that’s not entirely possible, for reasons I will explain.

Good Housekeeping, 1890. Contains many variations on Silver Cake aka “Foundation Cake”

First I must mention what you will find in the average 150-year-old personal cookbook.

These books are often a combination of hand-written recipes and newspaper or magazine clippings. Some are fairly small and others contain such an overwhelming chaos of recipe scraps that you can easily imagine the compiler making a weekly hobby of collecting recipes from the newspaper ladies page or her subscription to “Good Housekeeping.”

These aren’t treasured family recipes any more than your average pinterest board.

I began to see a correlation between these recipes and the facebook videos shared by family and friends. (Hey cousins-o-mine – did you ever *really* get around to making those cheddar-ritz cracker-buffalo-chicken bites?) Watching these videos lets us live the sensation and imagine the tastes of familiar ingredients combining into something new. With that in mind, it’s easy to see how the infinite combinations of flour, sugar, eggs, and butter offered a middle-class 19th-century woman an opportunity to escape into a fantasy (and occasionally to live the reality) of impressing friends, baking a treat for her family, and of course – personal enjoyment.

This 1826 magazine contained cooking receipts as well as information on gardening, drunkenness, and public abuses. That’s news you can use!

In “Cake: A Slice of History,” author Alysa Levine traces the history of cakes up from breads and dense fruit cakes on to the cultural changes that made lighter, sweeter cakes so appealing to 19th-century home cooks. “American bakers,” she writes, “did not remain wedded to their British heritage of rich fruit cakes for long. They soon lost most of their fruit and brown sugar, in favor of the rich whiteness of pound or Savoy cake… Appearances started to matter, and especially cakes which made an impression on the buffet table.”

The most important factor would be the decreasing cost of sugar. Sugar made its way into American diets through the 18th-century and left people craving more and more. Technological advances like better ovens and baking powder helped make cakes a realistic and attractive vehicle for a dose of sugar served at a special gathering or an afternoon ladies luncheon. With the amount of sugar at our disposal today, we can experience only a fraction of the excitement that the original compilers of the recipe books found in MDHS might have experienced when they clipped or copied these recipes.

Trade cookbooks from the baking powder and appliance companies, in addition to newspapers and magazines, helped to spread cake recipes nationally. “Even the ascetic Catherine Beecher included recipes for the popular pair of silver and gold cakes (one made with egg whites and one with yolks), often cut to show their insides and presented alternately down the table,” writes Levene.

After coming across similar recipes a dozen times in old manuscripts, I opted to make the famous Silver Cake, which, having been popularized just before the widespread availability of vanilla, was frequently sweetened with almonds and sometimes rose-water.

Advertisement, “The Favorite Receipt Book and Business Directory”

The recipe that I used comes from “The Favorite Receipt Book and Business Directory,” an advertisement-packed little book compiled in 1884 by the Ladies Aid Society of the Church of the Holy Comforter in Baltimore. The book offers up pages of bossy advice on housekeeping and social observances plus recipes, including over fifty for cakes. I chose a silver cake recipe calling for ‘sour cream’ even though this ingredient in 1884 would be meant more literally. I used modern “sour cream” which had been watered down with some milk.

According to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink In America, the popularity of Silver and Gold cakes were “rapidly dwindling” by the end of the Civil War, to be reformulated and replaced by white and yellow cake. For me at least, working backward has changed my views on cake somewhat. Using modern knowledge about the cake order of operations (creaming butter and sugar, eggs one at a time, alternating dry & wet ingredients), these old recipes have a great texture and please the sweet tooth – all in all, they are well worth the fantasy.

Recipe:

I used:

1 Cup butter
2 Cups sugar
3 Cups flour
.3 Cup sour cream plus milk to make ½ cup
8 egg whites
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 Teaspoon almond extract

Baked at 350° for 20-25 minutes in two round cake pans & stacked & iced with buttercream.

From The Favorite Receipt Book and Business Directory by The Ladies Aid Society of the Church of the Holy Comforter.

Beet Relish, Miss Helen Palen

August 3, 2017November 28, 2023

I thought we’d take things back into the 20th century this week.

Among the “treasures” acquired in 1960 by the Maryland Department of the Enoch Pratt Free Library (”Maryland Room Acquires ‘Treasures’”, Baltimore Sun, November 1960) is a copy of a cookbook put out in 1948 by the Maryland Home Economics Association. Much like the “Secrets of Southern Maryland Cooking” book, it is written in many different hands with varying degrees of legibility.

Entitled “Maryland Cooking,” the book manages to pack 310 recipes. Three are for beaten biscuits, one is for crab cakes. “Stuffed Country Ham” is there too. The book is also notable in that it draws from regions of Maryland where less community or historic cookbooks had been produced. One recipe for “Cornish Saffron Bread,” is prefaced with the description that it was introduced to Frostburg by settlers from Cornwall in the mid 19th century. Ethel Grove from Washington County appropriately contributed a recipe for “Maple Bavarian Cream.” Each of Maryland’s counties had a committee gathering recipes for the book.

The cover illustration was done by Richard Q. Yardley, an editorial illustrator for the Sun, whose illustrations also adorn the Sun’s “Fun with Food” and “Fun with Sea Food” books from the 1960s.

The purpose of “Maryland Cooking” was to gain funds towards a Washington, DC Headquarters for the American Home Economics Association, and hopefully to provide scholarships to help “finance the education of girls who want to become home economists.”

After cooking schools had codified the domestic arts into a sort of ‘science for women,’ this type of education became offered to a younger audience through private schools or as part of public high school education. Newspaper articles marveled, sometimes condescendingly, at this new branch of education. In May 1913, a Sun reporter visited the cooking classes, which were taught at Western High School in Baltimore, and observed 120 pupils, “Baltimore’s fairest,” studying “ways to capture the heart of the male of the species.” The reporter declared that even a “hardened misogynist” would be charmed by the epicurean meals prepared by the students.

A follow up story in June remarked on the “awful fuss they make over a panful of pie.”

Home Economics at Iowa State College, 1942, Jack Delano, loc.gov

The housekeeping department, the June article continued, was conducted by Miss Helen Palen(1883-????), the “presiding genius” of a “dainty little flat” used to teach cleaning methods and laundry, although Palen noted that she did not expect the girls to have to do their own laundry.

Palen was still teaching housekeeping at the school in 1919, when the Sun reported on how the school was training girls “for future usefulness.”

Palen’s commitment to home economics education ran deep, and she appears in Johns Hopkins circulars as attending courses for teachers throughout the late 1910s. She served as the president of the Maryland Home Economics Association from 1918-1920.

That was nearly 30 years before the publication of “Maryland Cooking,” but it is her recipe for Beet Relish that I turned to to preserve my spring beets and cabbage.

Similar recipes appear in newspapers at the turn of the 20th century, but the European origins couldn’t be much more obvious. The beets (and in this case, a healthy amount of sugar…) sweeten up the horseradish and the cabbage mellows the whole thing out. The most similar condiment I could find online is called “tsvikly” in the Ukraine.

I naively thought that my backyard horseradish would be sufficient at first. When I dug it up and found it puny and pitiful, I had to go to a few stores to find horseradish that was unadulterated with oils or other additives. I ultimately found it in the seafood section.

I had forgotten the joy of a nice oniony roast beef sandwich with horseradish and greens. The relish also made a nice cheddar grilled cheese.

I’ll be making more out of “Maryland Cooking.” The American Home Economics Association has since become the American Association of Family & Consumer Sciences. The archives of the now-defunct Maryland division is now housed at the University of Maryland Hornbake Library, where several copies of the book can also be found.

Lucky for me and this blog, it’s become pretty socially acceptable to make an “awful fuss over a panful of pie.”