Although Maryland’s history of celebrated restaurants, hotels and caterers may have influenced the cuisine that we enjoy to this day, there are very few recipes that can be directly tied to the early chefs.
Chefs tended to work more intuitively and from experience. Recipes – even the relatively vague ones found in 19th-century cookbooks, simply weren’t necessary.
By the time Frederick Phillip Stieff and others began to transcribe and collect recipes from famed establishments, a generation of Baltimore caterers had come and gone.
Instead, that legacy is woven throughout the recipes collected by well-to-do housewives and circulated in church cookbooks, eventually passing traces of restaurant prestige into everyday meals.
The name of one specific restaurant does appear in many Maryland recipe manuscripts, church and corporate cookbooks alike, and is not a Maryland restaurant at all.
Delmonico’s in 1903, Detroit Publishing Co., loc.gov
