With a rich yellow dough and an overabundance of dried fruits packed inside, Cornish Saffron Bread looks like the ultimate European Christmas treat. According to the Spitznas family of Frostburg Maryland, “in Cornwall, saffron bread is made on special occasions throughout the year, but in Western Maryland it became distinctly associated with Christmas.”
In 1955, Dr. James E. Spitznas (1893-1958) and his wife Elizabeth (1911-1994) (who were then living in Baltimore County) shared their recipe and story with Baltimore Sun food columnist Virginia Roeder. Roeder described Cornwall as the “land of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table,” but Dr. Spitznas pointed out that the tradition of Cornish saffron bread “probably preceded King Arthur by many centuries,” as the Phoenicians had been visiting Cornwall with packages of saffron for over 2000 years.
James & Elizabeth Spitznas making saffron bread together, 1955, Baltimore Sun
Dr. Spitznas recalled relatives from Cornwall mailing fragrant packages of dried saffron to Frostburg as the Christmas holiday approached.
Spitznas’ family had emigrated to the United States in 1874 from the village of Phillack, Cornwall. In the UK census, Dr. Spitznas’ grandparents Paul and Catherine Goldsworthy had been listed as “wire weavers and sieve makers.” In 1880 in Frostburg, Paul is listed as a laborer. It is possible that he came to do work relating to the mines of Western Maryland, like many other Cornish and Scottish settlers in Western Maryland throughout the 19th century.
Sarah Grace Goldsworthy became Sarah Spitznas and passed this recipe to James and his sister Sarah D. In 1948, Sarah D. and James’ wife Elizabeth measured and tested the old recipe to contribute it to the “Maryland Cooking” book.
The massive quantities called for in the “Maryland Cooking” recipe make enough bread to share with family, friends, and coworkers. I halved the recipe and still ended up with enough bread to freeze and eat for months to come. I think this will make an unusual French Toast, maybe good with a white wine sauce. As with all fruitcakes and fruit-containing Christmas breads, the dried fruits and nuts are variable by taste. I used currants, pineapple, and pecans. Don’t let raisins be the boss of you just because it’s Christmas!
Recipe:
Recipe from “Maryland Cooking,” 1948, Maryland Home Economics Association
Recipe note: after forming into loaves or buns, make sure to let rise again! The Spitznas used a bread pan but I didn’t have one so I rolled them into loaves.
With parts of Scandinavia so far north that the dark days of winter are endless, its no wonder that the region has rich December holiday traditions. While some of the old Norse Yule symbology made its way into Christmas around the world, other customs remain specific and regional.
St. Lucia Day is a particularly iconic Swedish holiday that commences the Christmas season. A friend of mine, Baltimore performer Lucia Treasure, recently made a facebook post explaining the holiday:
“A pre-Christian Swedish tradition, it is held on December 13th, or the solstice in the old calendar. The meaning of Lucia is light, and so the Swedish celebrate a folk hero who brought food to the poor in the winter as the small point of light on the darkest day of the year. Later, it was co-opted by Christians as their religion spread into the north, and Lucia was martyred in story so they could keep their traditions. Just as Christmas, originally a celebration of winter solstice, was also enfolded into a celebration of the birth of Jesus.”
Baltimore Sun, 1963
From there, the season continues with an array of foods and customs. I recently attended a party and tried some glögg & saffron buns, plus an array of more familiar-to-me favorites like gingerbread cookies (“pepparkakor”) and gravlax.
I searched my recipe database for ‘Swedish’ to come up with some options of what to bring. There are Swedish meatballs of course, but where’s the excitement in that?; “Swedish Cookies” from Somerset County; “Swedish Roll,” from 1906 (which was basically a Swiss roll filled with currants); or a “Swedish Salad” recipe pasted into Olivia Conkling’s personal recipe book from the Maryland Historical Society special collections.
This option intrigued me but I didn’t have time to make it to MDHS so I searched some old newspapers. Conkling’s books were full of clippings from all kinds of sources. She was a granddaughter of one of the owners of the famous Kirk Silver company. She married William Higgins Conkling of Davenport, OH, a bank president who had started his career in business as a coffee importer.
The cookbook may have also been handled or contributed to by their daughter Mary Olivia Conkling Ladd (1874-1953). The items clipped into these books are varied and interesting and I’ll explore them in greater depth later.
Anyway… so that is my tenuous connection to this recipe, which was printed in a multitude of regional newspapers in the early 1890s. The ingredient quantities are very vague, but I assumed this would be some muddled inauthentic 19th-century recipe anyway so I followed my instinct.
A more elaborate Swedish Salad recipe in the Wisconsin Post-Crescent, 1927
When I brought the salad to the party I was told that it turned out to be pretty authentic and incidentally something enjoyed around Christmastime.
I’ve noticed that some dishes which are enjoyed in the “old world” sometimes become more holiday-associated in America. Holidays are after all a time of family and heritage and seeking out just the right ingredients.
One Swedish custom I will be passing up on this Christmas is the ramped-up cleaning that, according to the Baltimore Sun in 1934, was customary. Every copper utensil “must glisten like gold,” curtains and linens must be cleaned, and chair seats wiped down, wrote Worthington Holiday. “There is a superstition that departed ones return to inspect the houses on Christmas Eve and woe be unto the housewife who is careless and does not please them.”
Dearly departed: I love you and miss you, but you’ll have to excuse the pet hair. God Jul!
According to Wikipedia, the word for punch comes from the sanskrit word for “five.” The drink was once made up of five components: water, citrus, alcohol, sugar, and “spice”. According to punch historian David Wondrich, the spice in question could be anything from “nutmeg or tea to ambergris.” (Hey that rhymes!)
The flavors of this traditional punch became a favorite of sailors and traders of the East India Company in the early 1600s. In 1655, the English captured Jamaica from the Spanish. Jamaican Rum became the next spoil of colonialism to make its way into punch.
Bomberger got the recipe from Otho Holland Williams Hunter, the great-great nephew of Otho Holland Williams.
Williams had served in the Continental Army during the Revolution, in command of the 6th Maryland Regiment of the “Maryland Line” from which our state nickname derives. After the war, he lived in a large estate in Williamsport (“Williams’ Port”), Springfield Farm.
The Springfield Farm property contained several outbuildings, including a spring house said to be built by Thomas Cresap, and a ‘still house’ where rye whiskey was aged. According to “Williamsport,” by Mary H. Rubin, that rye was a major source of income for the county.
Williams made efforts to convince his friend George Washington to locate the capital of our young nation in Williamsport, Maryland – and Washington strongly considered it. Washington was championing a canal to connect the Chesapeake Bay and Ohio Rivers, to better commence trade along the Potomac River through the mountains. It wasn’t until 1835 that the C & O Canal that Washington had envisioned made its way to Williamsport, and town became the second-largest town in Washington County.
Otho Holland Williams died in 1794, leaving the Springfield Farm estate to his brother before it then passed on to Otho’s own son Edward Greene Williams around 1810. Edward was the party guy so I like to think this punch is associated with him. He was known for his lavish entertainment at Springfield Farm, and frequently hosted the well-to-do from Washington. Betsy Patterson Bonaparte is said to have made a visit. MAYBE SHE DRANK THIS PUNCH.
At any rate, the recipe came into the hands of Otho Holland Williams Hunter. For all we know, he got it from one of his coworkers at C & P Telephone. Maybe he got it from his wife, Bettie Barber Bruin Hunter, daughter of a banker who raised money to preserve the Washington Monument. No, not that one…. Not that one either. The Washington Monument of Boonesboro – the first *completed* Washington Monument.
Whatever its origin, this is a punch fit for the holidays. I wasn’t aware of the rye made at the still house until after I had already made the recipe and so I had used Irish Whiskey, which is commonly called for in tea punch recipes. I also cut the sugar in half because… yikes. Many recipes call for crushed ice but since this one specified an ice block I took the opportunity to make this molded ice block that came out looking like some kind of shrimp aspic. Fashionable Betsy Patterson Bonaparte would not be impressed.
Recipe:
3 Pints whiskey
1 Pint rum
1 teacup green tea
24 lemons
4 Lbs sugar
2 Quarts water
oranges, pineapples, maraschino cherries, Curaçao
Three pints of whisky, 1 pint of rum, 1 large tea cupful of green tea, 2 dozen lemons, 4 pounds sugar, 2 quarts of boiling water. Pour water on tea and let it steep for a short time. Squeeze lemons over the sugar. Peel very thinly 18 lemons and pour the boiling hot tea over the peels. Let it stand 5 minutes, then strain and pour tea over sugar and lemon juice. When sugar is entirely dissolved add whisky and rum and strain again. When ready to use add oranges, pineapples (cut in dice shape), Maraschino cherries, or any other fruit you may like. Some persons like curocoa in it also. Put this punch mixture in the punch bowl with a large lump of ice. This quantity will serve twenty-five people.
Elizabeth Staats (1852-1933, Kent County) collected recipes – hundreds of them.
The collection started with a scrapbook Staats inherited from her mother Mary Griffith (1829-1892), whose original book contains handwritten recipes for food as well as things like soap and a “cure for cholera.” Staats finished that book before compiling the second book of over 300 recipes. (The two books are now housed at the Maryland Historical Society.) She was partial to cakes and desserts, although she occasionally clipped recipes for things like “Cheese Fondu”, scrapple, or deviled crabs. Many of the recipes are crossed out, “no good” written beside them, or with newer scraps pasted right over the old handwritten recipes.
There’s a social register’s worth of sweets: “Fannie Goodall’s” Chocolate Cake; “Alice Drekas’” Boiled Icing; “Laura Townsend’s” Crullers.
But Staats didn’t just rely on her extended personal network for recipe ideas – she had access to newspapers and multiple magazines like “The Country Gentleman,” “Ladies’ Home Journal,” and “Good Housekeeping.”
This recipe for “Unsurpassed Doughnuts” came from the latter. Good Housekeeping was founded in 1885 by publisher Clark W. Bryan with a mission to “perpetuate perfection as may be obtained in the household.” The new magazine combined that movement towards “domestic science” with fiction, poetry, and even some puzzles.
Paging through Staats’ scrapbooks, I could easily envision a woman spending leisurely afternoons poring over the magazine, clipping out good things she would like to eat.
Below her transcription of the doughnut recipe, Staats wrote “”Fine. Used this winter 1903.” Unlike so many others in the scrapbooks, this recipe has been tried – and approved. It had been submitted to Good Housekeeping my a Mrs. N.W. (Charlotte) Northrup, of Grand Rapids MI.
As is so often the case, the yeast component is basically unknowable. Its hard to understand how a recipe could even have meaning with such a huge variable. Nevertheless, I used a few teaspoons of dry yeast, and set the ingredients out to ferment overnight as instructed.
I made these doughnuts on the day of the Mayor’s Annual Christmas Parade. We cooked them up in my cousins’ Medfield kitchen and shared them with neighbors. They were pretty great. So was the parade, as usual.
Recipe:
“1 cup sugar, 3 cups milk, 1 cup yeast, make these into a sponge and let stand overnight; in the morning add 1 cup sugar, ½ cup butter, 3 eggs, ½ nutmeg, ½ tea-spoon soda, stir in flour until stiff.Let rise again, then mix stiff enough to roll, and cut into shape desired. Let rise again until light, then fry.Fine. Used this winter 1903To save grease in frying doughnuts; put ½ teaspoonfull of ginger in grease when hot.”
Recipe from Maryland Historical Society MS 1765, “Mary Black Griffith Cookbook”, via Good Gousekeeping Volume 35, 1902
Interpretation, as I recall it:
2 Cups sugar
3 Cups milk (room temperature)
4.5 teaspoons dry yeast
.5 Cup butter, soft
.5 tsp salt
3 eggs
.5 tsp nutmeg
.5 Teaspoons baking soda
flour (6-8 cups)
Combine 1 cup of sugar with the milk and yeast; let stand over night. In the morning add the other cup of sugar, then beat in eggs one by one. Beat in butter plus the other ingredients. Gradually add flour until dough starts to become smooth and form a ball that pulls away from the sides of mixer or bowl. Knead for about a minute then leave to rise for about 2 hours.
Beat down and roll to about ½” thickness, cut into desired shapes and let rise another 1-2 hours – until puffing up.
Fry in hot vegetable oil until golden brown – about 1-2 minutes each side.
Roll in sugar mixed with cinnamon and nutmeg. Accept compliments graciously.
“In a very real sense, ‘Maryland’s Way’ is Alice Brown’s Way.” – Tom Coakley, The Capital, Annapolis, 1975
Last month, I finished reading Michael Twitty’s book “The Cooking Gene,” and I was planning to write a whole post about it. I found myself basically at a loss to convey any meaningful context other than simply recommending the book itself. I have been referring to it as ‘part history, part memoir, and part philosophy’ – with a good amount of expository information about the actual nature of DNA tests and genealogy.
You may be familiar with Twitty’s work as a historian if you are a regular reader. When I plumb the 18th and 19th – and even the 20th century recipes – that lay the foundation of Maryland food, I’m constantly faced with the gaping holes in our documented food experience – where enslaved cooks, poor cooks, immigrant and working-class cooks had shaped our collective food history or carved out their own spaces in Maryland food. Sometimes it’s lost completely. Sometimes we are able to unearth faint traces of the lives and work of these cooks on census records, property records, and surviving narratives. Occasionally, as in St. Mary’s County, we are lucky enough to have situations where citizens and historians acted to preserve these stories for the future.
Ultimately it is important to remember that a lot of the recipes I cook and write about were written by wealthy white women who were nostalgic for slavery. Whether there is still value to be found in them is up for debate. I suppose that I must think there is, because I keep cooking them.
When I found out about Michael Twitty’s work many years ago I couldn’t believe how fortunate we could be in Maryland to have a steward seeking out and compiling the evidence of the origins of our foodways. When his ‘Open Letter to Paula Deen’ went viral in 2013, Michael Twitty began to take on a role beyond historian, as an arbiter of that history and modern American food culture, with its many questions and contradictions.
Thanks to Twitty’s long-awaited book, we have a bit of a rough outline to start the process of acknowledging the many enslaved cooks whose hands and traditions shaped the American food that is inseparable from “our” traditions as a whole in multicultural Maryland.
Tulip Hill, Maryland Historical Trust
The other day, I cooked up this fried eggplant from “Maryland’s Way,” figuring that I would find something to write about Tulip Hill, a historic plantation home in Galesville, Maryland. The house was built around 1755 by Samuel Galloway, a Maryland slave trader who owned several plantations and enslaved at least 87 people on those properties in addition to the “Men, Women, Boys and Girls” whom he sold into slavery.
“…The roots of American soul food began… among the tidal creeks, coastal plain and rolling Piedmont hills in the colonial Chesapeake region between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries… About 20,000 [enslaved Africans] would be brought to the Catholic colony of Maryland, predominantly from Senegal, Gambia, Ghana and Kongo.” – Michael Twitty, The Cooking Gene
In 1948, Tulip Hill was purchased by Hope Andrews and her husband Lewis. In the 1960s, Mrs. Andrews worked closely with Mrs. Frances Kelly to compile “Maryland’s Way,” perhaps the most beloved of Maryland cookbooks. In 2015, I praised Maryland’s Way as a “gargantuan effort” and quoted an article about the five years that the ladies spent testing over 700 recipes for the cookbook.
The credit for the recipe for “Eggplant Fried in Batter”, and three others in “Maryland’s Way,” reads “Tulip Hill, West River, ‘Alice’s Way.’”
This mononymous accreditation is common in historic recipes that have been appropriated from servants and slaves (when a credit is given at all). You wouldn’t know it from reading my blog, but I always make an attempt to tease out these ghosts from census records and any other source I can find. I usually come up empty-handed. This particular recipe, having been contributed by Mrs. Andrews herself, proved to be an exception.
According to an account of “Maryland’s Way” in “Outlook By the Bay”, Mrs. Kelly and Mrs. Andrews had assistance when they tested the many recipes included in the book:
“They compiled the recipes, but then needed to ensure that they were suitable for modern kitchens. Alice Brown, the cook at Tulip Hill, was tasked with testing them, and they found a willing taste-tester in Mrs. Andrews’ teenage nephew Harry Cannon. He vividly remembers Alice preparing all of the recipes as he eagerly watched, waiting to sample the results of her culinary endeavors. He still holds her partially responsible for his lifelong love of cooking and cookbook collecting.”
If this article is to be believed, Alice Brown tested and adjusted nearly all of the recipes in “Maryland’s Way.” These are Maryland recipes that have been duplicated in other books such as the Southern Heritage Cookbooks, reprinted in newspapers, and shared on the internet.
In 1975, the Capital in Annapolis ran a profile of Alice Brown. “We had to cut it all down to teaspoons and tablespoons from pounds,” Brown had said of the experience of interpreting the historic recipes. According to the Capital, Brown was the daughter of a tenant farmer from Lothian, Maryland. Although her mother hadn’t cooked for a living, she had “loved to prepare fine tasting dishes, and handed down that love to Alice,” who inherited her mother’s techniques and “a love of fresh farm foods.”
A photo accompanying the article shows a copy of the 19th century “Frugal Housekeeper’s Kitchen Companion”; a French cookbook; and a copy of “Aunt Priscilla in the Kitchen,” a compilation of the racist Baltimore Sun recipe columns of the same name.
Alice Brown in the Evening Capital, 1975. Hope Andrews bottom center.
The Capital mentions Alice’s husband’s name as Thomas and that they lived on Mill Swamp Road. Anything further is speculation on my part. An Alice Brown appears in the 1940 census in Anne Arundel county, where she is listed as a Black woman who was a servant for a “private family.” I found a 1940 military draft document for a Thomas Brown on Mill Swamp Road, whose wife is listed as Alice Rebecca Brown. Thomas Brown’s employment was with the Woodfield Fish & Oyster Company. There was an Alice Randall born in the early 1900’s in Lothian. That family did live on a farm but the patriarch was a blacksmith.
Andrews may have been affecting a historic norm when she attributed the recipe to “Alice” in “Maryland’s Way”. In doing so, she unwittingly perpetuated the erasure of the contributions of African Americans and of the ‘servant class’ to Maryland cooking.
In The Cooking Gene, Twitty directed a message to African Americans in particular: “We are not living in the past or for the past. Recognition, credit, acknowledgement, and the learning and transmission of the old ways are all critical. However, we need the best of our food culture as African people in America to move forward to give us opportunity… everything must be put on the table; our food is not just for us, it is a way into an alternative history and a new vision of who we can become.”
I think that regardless of ethnicity and genetic origin, everyone has a part in this. In addition to recognizing the legacy of the past in the food we eat today, we can all try to be more aware the ways in which well-meaning people can overlook existing inequality. I like to believe that we can learn from history without glorifying it.
Recipe:
1 Cup milk
1 medium eggplant
garlic salt
1 egg
1 Cup flour
.5 Teaspoon salt
.125 Teaspoon black pepper
Slice eggplant thin lengthwise. Sprinkle lightly with garlic salt, stack under a weighted plate for ½ hour. Make a batter by beating the egg and stirring in the flour and remaining seasonings, alternating with the milk. Mix until smooth and bubbly. Drain eggplant and pat dry. Dip each slice in batter and fry until golden brown in hot oil.
