It’s pretty rare that I should have *too much information* about a person associated with a recipe. For years now I’ve sighed in frustration when all I can find on someone is a date of birth, a passing newspaper mention, a headstone.
This week’s recipe comes from a woman who has been so scrutinized and written about that there is practically no point in summarizing her life story.
Wallis Simpson, The Duchess of Windsor, remains a fascinating figure to many. Any time members of the British royal family come up in the news, many Baltimoreans like to reflect on our city’s brush with royalty.
There aren’t many recipes specifically for blackberry pie. Usually, older recipes for “berry pie” will specify that blackberries, blueberries, or raspberries can be used.
Blackberry pie has been a longtime favorite of mine. I grew up making them with my grandmother so I wanted to make one for her birthday in September. I have also been falling behind on blog posts so I searched the newspapers for ‘blackberry pie.’
The recipe was shared in the Afro-American in 1938 by Mrs. Ida Reid. Mrs. Reid said that she enjoyed housework – and blackberry pie – and that she was heavily involved in her husband G. B. Reid’s Washington, DC department store.
The store was a longtime fixture at 11th and U (often stylized as “You”) streets in Northwest DC.
Mrs. Ida Reid’s blackberry pie in the Afro-American women’s pages, 1938
It may be impossible to know how many lesser-known Maryland cookbooks have been published and lost to time.
I’ve spent many hours obsessively searching the internet, library catalogs, bibliographies, and bookstores for titles to add to my list – especially anything from the 19th century or close to it.
A search of digitized newspapers once turned up the following snippet:
Staunton Spectator, 1902
This began a crazed search to locate a copy of the book. I couldn’t find much and I was disheartened. Months later I had a book pulled at the Maryland Historical Society and as I began to index it, it dawned on me… this was that book I’d read about!
Within its 790 recipes I found some interesting ones. There are three recipes for possum: “Roast Possum,” “Roast Possum (Maryland Style),” and “Roast Possum (Virginia Style).” There’s parsnip wine, “pineappleade,” banana frozen like ice cream, plus Baltimore favorites like sour beef, coddies, and crabcakes.
The book was printed in 1902. The 19th century still loomed large. There are many familiar favorites – forcemeat balls for soup, spinach a la creme, cabbage pudding, deviled crabs, etc.
From what I can tell of the “Maryland Cook Book”s author, Mrs. E. J. Strasburg, her own life changed with the times as well. She was born in 1850 to Conrad H. Kite and Caroline Allenbaugh. According to the 1850 census, the Kites enslaved at least three people. Other Kite extended family members are listed as owning a dozen more slaves. Many more (numbers – no names are given, sadly) are listed under the connected Miller family. The Miller–Kite House in Elkton, VA served as a headquarters for Stonewall Jackson during the Valley Campaign of 1862.
As a bizarre aside, there is a bit of local lore about Emma’s father. He died in 1858 and was buried in a cast-iron casket. In 1882 the family decided to move him to Thornrose Cemetery in Staunton. According to news articles at the time Kite was exhumed, the body had barely decayed in the 24 years it was underground. “The brother of the deceased was startled to see that the face looked just as it did the day the body was buried,” the Staunton Spectator reported. Apparently, a cedar tree had grown around the iron coffin and sealed it nearly air-tight.
David E. Strasburg worked for the Staunton Spectator as a typesetter. During the Civil War, he’d fought for the Confederacy for a few years “in the ranks” and rode out the final years of the war as a founding member of the “Stonewall Brigade Band.” In 1869, 31-year old David E. Strasburg married Emma Kite, who was 19 at the time. The couple and their four children moved to Baltimore around 1883.
David E. Strasburg with the Stonewall Brigade Band
The family began to take in boarders in the early 1890s, placing ads in the Staunton Spectator encouraging Baltimore visitors to stay with the Strasburgs. I don’t know whether this was financial or what. David died in 1895. The 1900 census lists a family of three boarding with Mrs. Strasburg, in addition to her daughter, son-in-law and their child.
And then there is the cookbook. The Woman’s Industrial Exchange was founded in 1880 with the mission of helping women earn money by selling items. On the other hand, a scathing 1898 editorial in the Sun claimed that the Exchange was primarily benefitting the already wealthy.
The reason I am so curious about Mrs. Strasburg’s finances is the context it might provide for her cookbook. Was she intending to emulate wealthy authors like Mrs. B. C. Howard with the prestige of compiling a book? Did she need the money? Did she donate proceeds to a charitable cause?
Alas, we will never know. Emma Strasburg died in May of 1902, just months after the book’s publication. Her name stayed in the papers as her daughter attempted to sue University of Maryland hospital over their negligent treatment of Emma, who’d had her left arm amputated due to cancer in her shoulder. Still under the influence of ether, Mrs. Strasburg was left in the room with a hot water bottle which badly burned her leg, prolonging her recovery. Ultimately, the judge found the University of Maryland not liable.
A lot of Mrs. Strasburg’s recipes tempted me. The sour beef recipe (attributed to her daughter) looks interesting. “Egg Lemonade” is a beverage I’ll have to try. “Siberian Punch” is a weird frozen concoction of whipped cream, meringue, and brandy.
I opted to make a gumbo recipe because okra is so plentiful this time of year. Many people don’t think of okra as a Maryland vegetable but the markets are flooded with it in August and September, and many old cookbooks feature recipes for okra soups and gumbo variants like this one. It may not be recognizable as a Louisiana gumbo, but the name ‘gumbo’ may derive from “ki ngombo,” a Niger–Congo term that many enslaved people would have used to refer to okra.
Strasburg’s recipe infuriatingly instructs the cook to use onion to flavor the frying fat and then to discard it. I disgruntledly removed the onion but I did save it for other use. I substituted rabbit meat for the chicken, making sure to include extra fat to make up for it. I also added a little shrimp powder for additional flavor. Many old Maryland gumbo recipes include crab or oysters.
I ended up with a huge amount of an okay stew. This recipe could be completely satisfying under certain circumstances – use a good chicken, cook over a campfire, and leave in the damn onion (throw in some garlic while you’re at it.)
Sadly, the copy of the “Maryland Cook Book” at the Maryland Historical Society is brittle and crumbling into dust. Miraculously, I eventually purchased a copy of this book for $15. It too is in danger of falling apart, but I donated the book to MDHS in hope that it can be preserved, and eventually, digitized for posterity.
Recipe:
1 onion
1 chicken
flour
1 Quart okra
1 Quart water or stock
cold veal or ham
1 Quart tomatoes, peeled and sliced
salt & pepper
corn
lima beans
green pepper
1 Tb butter
rice
“Fry an onion in lard or some good bacon fat; drain out the fried onion and throw it away. In the fat fry a chicken which has been cut into pieces and well floured. Put the chicken in a soup pot. In this same fat fry 1 quart of sliced okra. Put the okra in the pot with chicken, and cover with 1 quart of hot water, or better still, stock, if you have it on hand. If you have any pieces of cold meat – veal or ham – put them also into the pot, and let all stew slowly. When about half done, add 1 quart of tomatoes (peeled and sliced), salt and pepper to taste; also corn, lima beans, 1 green pepper and a large tablespoonful of butter. Thin, if required, with little hot water. Serve with boiled rice. Gumbo must not be cooked fast; it requires from 4 to 6 hours to cook properly.“
Recipe from “Maryland Cook Book,” by Mrs. E. J. Strasburg
Baltimore Peach Cake seems to be the bane of local recipe writers. By 1966, Evening Sun food columnist Virginia Roeder was exasperatedly telling readers “as for peach cake, I have published the recipe several times.” In 1958, she wrote about how she was bombarded each year with requests for peach cake recipes. Even Roeder’s predecessor, Eleanor Purcell, writing in racist dialect as “Aunt Priscilla” wrote in 1921 that she “done already gib a recipe fo’ peach cake.” (I’ve resolved to make a post addressing this ‘Aunt Priscilla’ elephant in the room before the year is out.) In 1991 the Sun reported that Baltimore Peach Cake was THE most requested recipe.
My own site analytics indicate that while no one has *asked* me for a recipe, plenty of people have done a search which led to my post. This has made me uncomfortable since that recipe was kind of a failure.
1914
I’m willing to bet that modern tested recipes are more reliable, but I thought I’d give it another shot (or two) nonetheless. This time around, I turned to Roeder’s recipe. The results were somewhat better, but I stuck with the regrettable 400° oven temperature – leaving my cake with a surface that was a little too tough. The Aunt Priscilla column was from a time before oven temperatures. In one version the top is dotted with butter. In another, it is topped with meringue after baking. Probably worth a try, frankly.
But again, when it comes to Baltimore Peach Cake, bakeries are considered the final word. The tradition is believed to have originated with the city’s German population. Advertisements in the early 1900s tempted diners to Brager’s Bakery with peach cake, iced tea and deviled crabs. Goetz’s bakery took out an ad announcing that the demand for their “celebrated peach cake” had exceeded supply in 1910. Would-be customers were encouraged to place their Saturday orders on Friday.
1964 Advertisement
In 1911 the prices of peaches went up and the Sun despaired that “Baltimore is writhing in the agony of a peach-cake famine.” Thereafter, the paper continued an annual tradition of singing the praises of peach cake. In 1913 they wrote “It is wonderful how much human enjoyment can be squeezed into the compass of one small piece of peach cake.” Another day that year, there was a snippet that read “Peach cake! ‘Nuff said.” In 1917 they called it “the universal peace-maker.”
Aside from Aunt Priscilla’s topping the cake with some butter, the glaze isn’t mentioned until the 1940s. Silber’s Bakery began to advertise its “sugar n spice glaze” in the 60s. Walter Uebersax of Fenwick Bakery told Sun writer Helen Henry that their caramel glaze was a “trade secret” in 1968.
By this time, Virginia Roeder has acquiesced to running her peach cake recipe annually. “No mention of peaches should be made without including the recipe for the famous Baltimore Peach Cake,” she wrote in 1969. “Requests for this recipe have led all others. Here it is once again.”
One Sun columnist who has never tired of writing about peach cake is Jacques Kelly. His occasional articles on peach cake are always a celebration, and a platform to advise against any cinnamon or glaze. “I think of this glazing as Formstoning what was once a simple and delicious product,” he wrote in 2010. I’m not sure that unglazed peach cakes are even offered by any of the small handful of peach-cake-selling bakeries within Baltimore City, however. Maybe we can compromise just a little, to keep this beloved tradition alive.
Recipe:
Peach Cake With Raised Sweet Dough Base
(Makes two 9-inch round cakes)
1 Cup lukewarm milk
.25 Cup sugar
1 Teaspoon salt
1 cake compressed yeast (2 ¼ tsp dry yeast)
1 egg
.25 Cup shortening
3.5 to 3.75 Cup flourMix together milk, sugar, salt and crumble into mixture, yeast. Stir until yeast is dissolved. Stir in egg and shortening. Mix in first with spoon, then with hands, half the flour, then the remainder of the flour. When the dough begins to leave the sides of the bowl, turn it out onto a lightly floured board and knead. Knead dough, then place in greased bowl, turning once to bring greased side up. Cover with damp cloth and let rise in warm, draft-free spot until double in bulk, about 1 ½ to 2 hours. Punch down, let rise again until almost double in bulk, 30 to 45 minutes. Divide dough in half.Pat dough into greased 9-inch round pan forming a ridge around the edge. Arrange thinly sliced peaches overlapping one another in a circle around the center. To keep peaches from darkening, sprinkle with lemon, orange or grapefruit juice. Cover and let rise until double, 25 to 35 minutes. Bake 25 to 30 minutes in 400-degree oven.
Quick Apricot Glaze:
Add 1 tablespoon hot water to 1/3 cup apricot jam.
