Month: July 2019

Strawberry Ice

Eliza Leslie’s “Strawberry Ice” isn’t exactly a Maryland recipe. I made this dessert to partake in the Dundurn Recipe Challenge. Since I didn’t get to a dedicated blog recipe, here it is.

Dundurn Castle is a historic site operating as a civic museum in Hamilton Ontario. The mansion was built in 1835, on the site of a former British military encampment, for railway magnate and Candian legislator Sir Allan MacNab. The estate has been the property of the city of Hamilton since 1899.

Hamilton is a long way from Maryland and indeed I have never been there. But social media has created a fun way to connect over historic cooking. For the first challenge, the people at Dundurn turned to Eliza Leslie’s 1850 “Lady’s New Receipt-book.” Leslie’s 1837 cookbook, “Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches,” was the most popular cookbook of the 19th-century cook-book boom, and her recipes were shared and imitated far and wide.

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Onion Pie, Nancy Polikoff

I mostly choose recipes at random, so it’s interesting when I can find so much information on the lives and contributions of people associated with them. Many of the authors of the very old cookbooks I work from had some of the worst politics imaginable. Nancy Polikoff, on the other hand, spent her entire career championing causes that I happen to agree with.

When I emailed Polikoff about her onion pie recipe in the 1977 “Home Grown Recipes: A Collection of Vegetarian Recipes From the Listeners of WHFS, 102.3 FM“, she had no recollection of the cookbook. She did recall being a WHFS listener in the 1970s, a former college-radio DJ in Philadelphia, and a pescatarian (she occasionally eats chicken now.)

I grew up listening to WHFS (mostly on its 99.1 frequency) and I’ll have to make a separate post about that at some point. Polikoff’s career deserved its own post.

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Egg Lemonade

“A lady whose husband had a severe cold recomended flaxseed lemonade.
‘Huh!’ he said, irascibly, ‘a man can’t have a cold without everybody suggesting some fool remedy. I’ll send for a doctor.’
So the doctor came, charged the sick man $2 for his visit and advised flaxseed lemonade.” – New York Sun, 1887

The earliest recorded evidence of lemonade comes from Egypt, where in the year 1000 AD, peasants made a drink of lemons, dates, and honey. The poet Nasir-i-Khusraw wrote of a bottled beverage made from sugar and lemon juice, known as qatarmizat, being traded and exported.

In 17th century France, a honey-sweetened version of lemonade was sold by street vendors known as ‘limonadiers’.

Meanwhile, in Britain, they had been enjoying various forms of a drink called a “posset,” made variously with milk wine, spices, herbs, or/and sometimes egg. Lemon and orange juice inevitably made their way into these beverages. And so, “egg lemonade” became a logical form of refreshment.

  • “The Up-To-Date Bartender’s Guide,” Harry Montague, 1913
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