“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.”
