October 2017 - OLD LINE PLATE

Eggless Squash Or Pumpkin Pie (Thanksgiving in Maryland)

October 26, 2017February 17, 2023

“The Baltimore Sun is trying to coax the Governor of Maryland to appoint a yankee festival…
Why don’t our Governor move in the important matter of appointing a day for thanksgiving? Pumpkin pies are coming from all quarters, and no day set apart yet.” – The Baltimore Sun, 11/15/1837

The Baltimore Sun was in its infancy when the newspaper took up an obsessive crusade to bring Thanksgiving to Maryland. For several years prior, other Maryland newspapers had reported on states whose governors had proclaimed a November day of thanksgiving. New York, Connecticut and New Hampshire in 1825; Massachusetts in 1830; Maine, Ohio, and Michigan in 1837; Ohio in 1839. (In some states, the announcements were made annually or the actual dates changed year-to-year.)

The Sun began publication in May of 1837. When their own November thanksgiving announcements started rolling out, most of them were accompanied with pleas to Governor Thomas Veazey to appoint a Thanksgiving in Maryland.

The announcements almost always mentioned pumpkin pie. In 1838 the Sun printed the news that The Boston Times described Thanksgiving day as a joyous occasion with “cider, frolic and fried dough-nuts.” “Where were the pumpkin pies?” the Sun replied accusatorially. While other papers such as the Maryland Gazette waxed spiritual about gratitude and strife, “the prayer of thanksgiving as well as that of invocation,” the Sun, in Baltimore food-obsessed fashion, continued to focus on the pie.

In 1842 the Sun plea to Governor Francis Thomas made a more serious appeal for the holiday by mentioning what a joyous day it was, how it had been adopted even by governors who were not “Yankee men”, and how Maryland had so many causes to be thankful. They even lamented the years of reporting on the official Thanksgiving proclamations of “‘this, that and the other’ governor[s] of ‘this that and the other’ state[s]’” without Maryland having a thanksgiving of our own.

The choice to abandon the pumpkin-pie talk for the patriotic overtures was a wise one. On November 19th, 1842, Governor Thomas declared that the 14th of December would be a day of “thanksgiving, praise and prayer to the Almighty, because of the manifold blessings enjoyed by [Marylanders].” The Sun smugly printed the proclamation while mentioning that they “might take some small credit to [them]selves for a suggestive agency.”

The newspaper tactfully left pumpkin pie out of that announcement, but they later printed suggestions on how to observe the new holiday, sneaking the pie in behind piety:

“The custom in other States, where a day has been set apart of this kind, is in the forenoon to go to church, then dine on roast turkies, plumb puddings and pumpkin pies, in the afternoon innocently amuse themselves and close the evening with a grand ball.” – The Baltimore Sun, 11/29/1842

A correspondent from Ellicott’s Mills wrote on December 1st, 1843, the day after that year’s Thanksgiving that “it is said that pumpkin pie will make a Yankee’s mouth water. Be that as it may; but give me good fat turkey and pumpkin pie… that pie! O, that pumpkin pie! Who can properly express the deliciousness of that pumpkin pie?”

*Suggested Thanksgiving Menu, Indiana, 1888*

Tastes change. In 1907 the Baltimore Sun had done a turnabout on pumpkin pie, printing an editorial which declared it to be “a vile pretender” which was “tolerated, but not loved.” The author lamented that pumpkin pie was just a vehicle for spices and declared that “examined in the cold glare of actual fact, the pumpkin pie becomes obviously bogus and unspeakably contemptible.”

What on earth happened? Well, for starters there is the very Northern “Yankee” associations of pumpkin pie in a state whose loyalties had been torn apart in the Civil War. In a recent essay, historian David Shields pointed to the widespread availability of canned pumpkin which was itself shipped from the north. “Canned pumpkin pie filling from the North and its distribution through southern groceries set off the woe reflex in southerners,” wrote Shields. Pumpkin pie and its Southern counterpart the sweet potato pie became symbolic. The perceived replacement of the latter by the former aroused anxieties about fading traditions and culture.

Both pies have lived on, although the argument for pumpkin pie as a spice delivery system has been given new life by the raging fad of using those spices in other products. Here again, the backlash is disproportionate. Most of the spices used in pumpkin pie have been present in sweet and savory dishes since time immemorial. A bite of ‘pumpkin spice’ beef a la mode wouldn’t make Mary Randolph furrow her brow one bit.

I confess to being a one-time pumpkin pie detractor, but this recipe actually changed my mind. This pie was creamy and excellent. There could be a few explanations for this. 1: I used butternut squashes from my CSA so maybe they’re superior, 2: I cooked them in a certain wildly-popular pressure-cooking kitchen appliance, 3: Maybe my pie preferences were an insecure affectation all along.

I got the recipe from a book called “Grannie’s Goodies from Somerset County,” compiled in 1970 by the residents of the Alice B. Tawes nursing home in Crisfield. Alice B. Tawes was the mother of Governor J. Millard Tawes. According to the Baltimore Sun, “the story goes that the home’s director was tired of residents’ complaints about the food, so he asked them to submit a favorite recipe to be cooked and served at the home.”

I traced this particular recipe, almost word-for-word, back to “Buckeye Cookery,” a classic community cookbook compiled in the 1870s by the First Congregational Church in Ohio.

Abraham Lincoln made Thanksgiving a national holiday during the middle of the Civil War (1863). In addition to reflecting on our agricultural abundance, he suggested that citizens pray for “the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation.”

Despite these solemn origins, the traditions of festivities and sports on Thanksgiving date back equally as far – whether it was clothing sales, shooting contests, or the football games that the Baltimore Sun proclaimed in 1903 to be “passing away as a Thanksgiving pastime.” The “gridiron sport” remains as much a part of Thanksgiving as ever, 125 years later, as does the pumpkin pie. The “vile pretender” is here to stay.

Recipe:

“Stew the squash or pumpkin till very dry and press through a colander; to each pint should be added 1 tablespoon butter. Beat in while warm 1 cup brown sugar or molasses; a little salt, 1 tablespoon cinnamon, 1 teaspoon ginger and ½ teaspoon soda. A little allspice may be added but it darkens the pies. Roll a few crackers very fine and add a handful to the batter or thicken with 2 tablespoons flour or 1 of cornstarch. As the thickening property of pumpkin varies, some judgment must be used in adding milk.”

From The Buckeye Cookbook via “Grannie’s Goodies from Somerset County”

Adaptation:

2 Pints pumpkin or squash (about one of the squashes pictured)
2 Tablespoons butter
2 Cups brown sugar
1.5 tsp salt
2 Tablespoons cinnamon
2 Teaspoons ginger
1 Teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon allspice
4 Tb flour
¼ cup evaporated milk

Peel squash and cook until soft. Drain well. Mash and stir in butter, sugar, soda, and spices. Stir in milk. This mixture can be stored overnight (I did). Mix in flour and pour in pie shell just before baking. 425° for about 40 minutes or until pie is no longer “jiggly.” Serve with whipped cream.

Grape Fruit Candy, Harriet Caperton Shaw

October 18, 2017January 12, 2019

Warning: This is a pretty macabre story to go with a candy recipe post. It’s October, so if you want you could come up with some intrigue about ghosts in Greenmount Cemetery. If you are more the spiritual type you can think of the connections between food and communion with the dead.

A recent run-in with a bad head-cold scared me back into eating massive quantities of citrus fruit. After carefully removing the flesh and juice from a half-dozen grapefruits I figured I would finally try a common old recipe: candied citrus peel. Lemon and orange had been popular options in all of my oldest cookbooks but in the early 20th-century grapefruit really began to catch on.

Baltimore at that time had more diverse produce options than you would expect. While citrus fruit from Florida was a huge industry, the ports at the Inner Harbor were just as likely to receive shipments from Jamaica along with other items like coconuts and bananas. Occasionally fruit was even smuggled in. Many failed fruit smuggling efforts were reported in the pages of the Baltimore Sun from the late 1800s through 1910s.

In September of 1909 the Baltimore Sun reported that “Grape fruit is more popular each season, and is no longer considered a luxury, as formerly.”

For the most part, as you would expect, grapefruit was eaten for breakfast, juiced, or served more pretentiously scooped out and combined with other fruits back in their halved rind. If using both the fruit and the peel was not sufficient, the women’s page of the Sun had the following DIY hint in 1913: “the seeds of grapefruit have an æsthetic use which the lowly apple core has not, for if planted they will grow into a beautiful green vine.”

By 1931 the local grocery store Hopper & McGaw listed grapefruit as a “Thanksgiving specialty,” along with raisins, mince meat, figs and nuts.

“The Tried and True Recipe Book” at the Enoch Pratt Free Library

The cookbook I got my candied peel recipe from is not dated, but the call number at the Pratt Library implies it is from 1920. Entitled “The Tried and True Recipe Book,” it was compiled by the Woman’s Guild of the Church of St. Michael and All Angels in Baltimore. Lots of the surnames ring familiar to me from street names, Maryland families, and other recipes in my collection: Mosher, Sothoron, Diffenderffer, etc.

This recipe (as well as many others in the book ranging from soups to sweets) was contributed by Mrs. J. J. Forbes Shaw, the wife of a Baltimore banker and tobacco merchant. Born Harriet Alexander Hereford in Union WV in 1874, she hailed from well-known families. Her father, Frank Hereford was a senator and congressman. Her grandfather on her mother’s side, Hugh Elmwood Caperton, was also a congressman. The maternal side of her family are ancestors of William Gaston Caperton III, the governor of West Virginia from 1989-1997.

Harriet married James John Forbes Shaw in 1907, and the family lived at 1809 N. Calvert Street. They were fairly prominent, turning up in society columns in the Sun. In 1921, however, their mentions took a turn for the tragic.

Rev. Wyatt Brown, D. D., “The Tried and True Recipe Book”

Their 12-year old daughter Alice Caperton Shaw drowned when a rowboat containing the girl, her two sisters and three other children capsized on the Servern River. Reverend Wyatt Brown, whose photo appears in the front of “The Tried and True Recipe Book,” rescued the other five children. The many newspapers that covered the incident reported that he was a nervous wreck after the incident, covered in scratches from the children’s grasps.

Twelve years after the harrowing incident, in April 1933, Harriet Shaw died at age 59. Mr. Shaw did not recover from the pain of these deaths. On September 20th, 1937, he visited the graves of his wife and daughter at Greenmount Cemetery. Eventually, he kneeled on the ground, pulled out a pistol and shot himself in the head. The cemetery superintendent who had been watching Shaw pace in the cemetery cried out, but it was too late. Shaw left a note pinned to his clothing, stating simply “The act is my own.”

The Shaw home on 1809 N. Calvert Street is no longer standing, but nearby, The Church of St. Michael & All Angels is still there at 2013 St. Paul. The reverend who saved the surviving daughters from the 1921 boat accident is most likely Hunter Wyatt-Brown. He was known for weaving the “Lost Cause” ideology into his sermons, and Mrs. Shaw had been a member of Daughters of the Confederacy. Today, The Church of St. Michael & All Angels serves a multicultural congregation.

Although Wyatt-Brown left Maryland to become a bishop in Harrisburg Pennsylvania, his son Bertram Wyatt-Brown returned to Baltimore to study history at Johns Hopkins. In “The Society for U.S. Intellectual History” in 2015, Andrew Hartman wrote of Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s work: “Bert… zeroed in on the tragic and gothic South, as well as a host of men and women, gnarled by death, humiliation, loss, and anxieties. His books are populated by the chronically depressed, and by tortured writers on the brink of suicide, or novelists who were as much at war with the self as the region they called home.”

Recipe:

Grapefruit peel, cut into thin slices
salt
water
sugar

“After taking out the meat of the grape fruit cut rind in long pieces. Cover it with a strong salt water and let it soak 12 hours. Change water every 12 hours until rinds have soaked in strong brine 48 hours. Take rinds out of salt water and cover with fresh cold water and let it boil 10 minutes. Change water and let it boil another 10 minutes. Do this 6 times. Then take it out and weigh rinds and put a pound of sugar to every pound of fruit. Let cook slowly until the syrup, formed by putting sugar on rinds, has boiled away. Then take out piece by piece of grape fruit and roll in granulated sugar.“

Recipe from “The Tried and True Recipe Book,” Woman’s Guild, Church of St. Michael and All Angels, Baltimore

candied citrus peel chopped as a jelly roll cake filling

Creamed Kale and Onions

October 11, 2017March 29, 2022

“Because fall and winter diets are often deficient in vitamins, A, B, and C, and important minerals, kale should be served at least two or three times a week.” – 8/7/1953 Hagerstown Morning Herald

I recently acquired this little community cookbook, “Kitchen Kapers,” put out by Bethel 31 of The International Order of Jobs Daughters in 1952. I had a hard time finding any history specific to this Masonic organization chapter, which is located in Westminster. The basic gist of their mission as stated on their website is that they teach “leadership, charity, and character building.”

The recipe’s contributor, Virgina Stoner, appears to have been about 31 when the book came out in 1952. Her family owned a Westminster home that had been surveyed by the Maryland Historical Trust for some unique architectural features. It was noted in their report that the home had been in the family since it was built in 1890.

There are a few things that I found interesting about this cookbook. The first is the 1950’s graphics which actually look so much like kitschy clip-art that I originally assumed the book was much newer. This style is so ubiquitous now that it is hard to imagine it in its contemporary context.

The same community cookbook – title, artwork and all – appears to have been used all over the country with recipes from different organizations. It has little corny comics throughout the book – an interesting inclusion for a book design that is basically a template.

As for the recipe itself, I find its open-endedness to be a little surprising. You can either use milk or just use the pot liquor to make the sauce for the kale. Those are two very different options. I suspect the latter option may be a holdover from WWII-era thriftiness.

Cumberland News, June 14th, 1943

I opted for the milk because, as a 1959 headline declared in the Salisbury Daily Press: “Kale Tastes Good in Cream Sauce.”

Creamed kale recipes appear to have been pretty popular during that decade, although recipes for a similar dish appeared in the 1930s under the moniker “panned kale [or spinach].” In the 19th century, it’s predecessor was known as “spinach a la creme.”

Despite its current undeserved punch-line status, kale has been in the U.S. since European colonization. The word probably comes from the same root as colewort, which is now basically known as collards.

In the 1890s, the Baltimore Sun occasionally reported on the thousands of barrels of kale that were shipped north from Norfolk. It was fairly popular in markets as well as gardens.

Hagerstown Morning Herald, June 26, 1950

It was in the 1930s that the health benefits of kale really started to get attention. The Afro-American published a recipe for panned kale in 1930 under the headline “Pure Food Builds Health.” Articles in women’s columns continually provided recipes and boasted of kale’s nutritional value thereafter.

I was surprised to learn that kale was even eaten raw in salads historically. I am partial to raw kale salads myself, but somehow I bought into the hype and just assumed that raw kale was some modern-health-food era reverse-innovation.

Never-mind the fact that many of the nutrients in kale may not even be bioavailable when kale is consumed raw. In fact, the vitamins are probably all in that pot liquor that I set aside to replace with milk. Ah, well.

Recipe:

1.5 Lb kale
water
salt
2 Lb onions
.25 Cup shortening
3 Tablespoon flour
1.5 Cup milk
salt
pepper, black

“Wash well 1 ½ lbs kale
Cook in boiling salted water – enough to come half-way up around kale – until tender, about 15 minutes.
Peel 2lbs (about 12) small white onions
Cook in boiling salted water until tender, about 15 minutes. Drain and save liquid from both cake and onions.
Combine vegetables.
Make a sauce of
¼ c. shortening
3 tbsp flour
1 ½ c. milk (or use vegetable liquid)
Salt and pepper
Pour over kale and onions.
Serves 6.”

Recipe from “Kitchen Kapers,” Bethel 31 Of The International Order Of Jobs Daughters” Westminster, MD

Corn Pudding, Betty Worthington Briscoe

October 4, 2017January 12, 2019

I don’t know about you but I’m not through with corn just yet. You can hold the pumpkin until I’m done scraping kernels from the last fresh cob I can find.
I like to broil it (or grill it) and add it to things or freeze for later. This time I opted for a plain corn pudding to best utilize the taste of the flame-caramelized corn.

I found a recipe in “Maryland’s Way” care of Betty Worthington Briscoe. The Briscoe name can be found throughout Southern Maryland in the descendants of some of Maryland’s original volonists as well as the descendants of people who had been enslaved at plantations such as Sotterly.

In this case, the branch of the family in question resided in Calvert County where the father of Everard Briscoe was a physician. Everard too would become a physician, marrying Harriett Elizabeth “Betty” Worthington in 1923 and moving to Baltimore. The family was prominent in Maryland, frequently mentioned in the Baltimore Sun as well as newspapers in Washington County where Betty was from.

The daughter of a well-known railroad conductor (who had a route from Hagerstown to Baltimore), Betty had received a degree from what is now Towson University. Although she never used her teaching degree until after her husband’s sudden 1944 passing, she did lots of other work from serving the Red Cross to being the secretary of the Calvert County Historical Society. She wrote a weekly column in the Calvert Independent newspaper called “Know Your County.” The column has served as a resource, especially for the Maryland Historical Trust’s cataloging of historically significant structures in the region.

Old Field, Maryland Historical Trust

One such structure was the home that Betty and Everard eventually resided in, known as “Old Field.” It had been built in 1891 by Everard’s uncle, Judge John Parran Briscoe, “a prominent judge in the Maryland Circuit Court and Court of Appeals.” Everard Briscoe practiced medicine in the downstairs of the large home.

Still residing at Old Fields, Betty died in 1981 at age 79. Shortly after, the house (presumably the doctor’s office portion) was converted into a restaurant. According to “A Taste of History: A Guide to Historic Eateries and Their Recipes” by Debbie Nunley and Karen Jane Elliott, the restaurant served a cake named in Betty’s honor.

It was really only natural that corn should find it’s way into pudding. Pudding is THE most time-honored British-descended American food tradition. (I need to write a whole thing about that eventually…) While rice pudding still lives on, the often-less-sweet corn pudding is somewhat more obscure. It’s a shame because this versatile dish can make a great side, dessert, or even a main dish with a little creativity. You could top it with hot sauce, honey, or both for that matter. It’s a good way to transition away from fresh summer goodness into the warm, goopy dishes of fall.

Recipe:

2 eggs
1 Teaspoon salt
1 Tablespoon flour
1 Teaspoon sugar
1 Cup milk
1 Cup grated corn
butter

Beat eggs. Add salt, flour and sugar; then whisk in the milk and corn. Pour into a greased baking dish and dot with butter. Bake at 350° oven until it is solid but wobbly, about 45 minutes.

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