December 2021 - OLD LINE PLATE

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.

Month: December 2021

Kris Kringle Salad, Juanita B. Michael

Brown Stone Front, Mrs. Byron S. Dorsey

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