A few weeks ago I came across a recipe for something called “Christmas Bell Salad.” The process entailed cooking canned pears in melted cinnamon candy until the pears were red and cinnamon-flavored, and then serving the pears with dyed-green cream-cheese piped at the top to make the pear look like a bell.
I don’t usually get a lot of kicks mocking mid-century food, but I was amused and intrigued. People often send me recipes that sound weird, gross or ill-advised, but this blog has expanded my ideas about food so much that I am rarely fazed. What is it about “Christmas Bell Salad” that got to me?
I guess it just goes to show you that there’s always room for growth. I don’t get my baking chocolate or nuts from the baking aisle, so why would it be weird to use candy for its red coloring and cinnamon flavoring? A little imitation cinnamon goes a long way, after all. I certainly don’t have a bottle on hand.
More recently I found a similar concept in the 1948 “Favorite Recipes” cookbook compiled by the Naomi Circle of the Woman’s Society of Christian Service at the Marvin Memorial Methodist Church in Silver Spring. “Kris Kringle Salad” features apples cooked in a cinnamon candy syrup and served with avocado on lettuce. No dyed cream cheese is involved. I thought this sounded a little more interesting and appealing.
Mrs. Brown, the first-nameless protagonist of playwright Chandos Fulton’s 1873 novelette, responds witheringly to the news that a friend’s daughter has wed a man of modest means. “It was a love-match, I suppose,” her friend Mrs. Campbell told her, and Mrs. Brown “did not deign a reply.”
As the plot of Fulton’s novel unfolds, Mrs. Brown meddles in her own daughter Adele’s romantic life, breaking off a would-be “love-match,” to fix Adele up with a wealthier suitor. Adele’s marriage to the moneyed fellow is an unhappy one, and a scandal breaks out when people incorrectly suspect Adele of having an affair with another man. It turns out that Adele was just lonely, and when Adele’s cold-but-wealthy husband Mr. Dick comes to understand this, he becomes an ideal husband on command. Adele Brown and her ambitious busybody mother both get a happy ending. The original love-match man who broke Adele’s heart due to Mrs. Brown’s scheming in Chapter Four is never mentioned again.
Mrs. Brown’s desire for Adele to marry a wealthy man is symbolized by a status-symbol that serves as the book’s title: “A Brown Stone Front.”
Newspapers in New York City had been advertising “brown stone front” buildings for sale and rent since the 1840s. Other cities followed suit, and a “brown stone front” remained an attractive selling point in real-estate for the better part of the following century.
What was originally a cheaper and easier-cut alternative to marble and limestone became synonymous with success in America.
“Next to loving, I suppose that eating is the most fascinating as well as the most deadly form of indoor sport practiced in America, or anywhere. Perhaps I should have placed eating first, for many folks have dyspepsia so badly that they have forgotten how to love and are so disagreeable that no one loves them either.”
— The Barter Lady: A Woman Farmer Sees It Through
According to Evelyn Harris herself, she had a reputation among the seasonal farm workers of Kent County: “Miss Eveline sure feeds you well.” Harris had learned some of her recipes from her mother-in-law, Margaret Harris (nee Grier) who, like her, was originally from Baltimore but moved to the Eastern Shore to become a “farmer’s wife.”
Evelyn was born Mary Evelyn Bockmiller in 1884 to Charles Howard and Jessie H. Bockmiller. Her family lived at 1500 E Lafayette in Baltimore City. At age 10, Evelyn later said, she had “helped to build the Methodist Church at North avenue and Caroline street by selling homemade candy.” In later years, she would describe childhood summers spent selling snowballs with syrups made from flavorings and cornstarch. Her product, she recalled in 1918, had been “about as good as ice cream.”
She graduated from Eastern Female High School in 1903. The Baltimore Sun regularly mentioned her name in relation to musical performances. Her 1906 wedding engagement announcement said she had been a music teacher for “a number of years.” Evelyn had been attending the Peabody Conservatory, but halted her musical education to marry a Kent County farmer named Arthur Livingston Harris. After moving to the Eastern Shore, Evelyn played organ at Betterton Methodist Church, which shared pastors with nearby Still Pond Methodist Church. Still Pond Methodist produced the cookbook that this recipe came from, and that church cemetery is where Evelyn and her husband are buried. Arthur came from a prominent farming family. His own father, whose parents had moved to Maryland from Delaware in 1838, was “one of the pillars of the Methodist Church in the village of Still Pond,” according to a 1914 obituary in the Kent News of Chestertown.
Evelyn was an outspoken woman who used her position as a farmer’s wife to engage local papers with many letters and, eventually, impassioned columns. In 1914 she wrote an article in the Country Gentleman magazine touting the benefits of a Home Economics course she’d taken at a state college. There, she’s learned about new devices like a vacuum cleaner. She’d learned about bacteria in the kitchen, and thermometer readings for safety. She’d also learned about how store-bought preserves contained artificial ingredients, and about the science of bread-rising. Her friends, she said, were astonished that she would enroll in a home economics course. “You [know] how to cook as well as anyone around here!,” they told her, and she happily conceded that she did in fact know how to cook well, but that “perhaps [she] could learn how to do it more easily.”
With our food culture fixated on ‘chef as singular genius, driver of innovation and change,’ I’ve come to brag about how I prefer to value the contributions of home cooks. I like to tout and uplift cooking born of tradition and love -and yes- sometimes plain old drudgery. I make a show of respecting these unsung heroes and shunning the professionals.
But it’s never quite that simple, is it?
While a small portion of my recipes hail from named chefs and restaurants, perhaps an even bigger segment hail from a different type of professionals: home economists and dietitians. These cooks – usually women – provided countless recipes to corporate cookbooks and newspapers. They disseminated recipes through cooking classes. They also contributed quite a lot of recipes to community cookbooks.
Mrs. Lyman C. Whittaker contributed this recipe for Rock Chowder to the 1976 “Ladies of St. Mary’s Cook Book,” a cookbook put out by the church of the same name on Duke of Gloucester Street in Annapolis. The book subtitle boasts “colonial flavor,” and many of the recipes are for local favorites like crab cakes, and this rockfish chowder. I was surprised that the recipe author was not originally from Maryland.
Mrs. Whittaker was born Gertrude Marie Speck in East Moline, IL on July 11, 1917. The Specks were a very socially prominent family, and young Gertrude received mentions in the paper throughout her youth for birthday parties, music and dance recitals, and Catholic clubs. The family had a cottage on Campbell’s Island in the Mississippi, where Gertrude frequently entertained friends. Honestly, the coverage of Gertrude’s social life in Illinois newspapers at times borders on gratuitous. The the Moline “Dispatch” even mentioned when she came home for the holidays in 1939.
Initially, I was distracted by the many ads throughout the book for long-defunct Baltimore businesses. I photographed many of the ads and came home to realize I had not documented the recipes. When I made Hallie A. Shinnamon’s Christmas Cookie recipe from the book, I became intrigued by the realization of how many of the recipes belonged to former residents of the Waverly, Charles Village and Remington neighborhoods that I have lived in since 2007. I located these addresses using old censuses and city directories from around the time the book was published.
In my library, I have a facsimile reprint of the book that was made some time in the 1970s or 80s. A full scan of this cookbook is available on archive.org. The map below shows corresponding page numbers to locate the recipes. As always, I would love to hear from you if you find a recipe from your house!
