Year: 2022

(Pickled) Citron Cake

After successfully growing citron melons this summer, I found that I had even more melons than required to make Agnes Poist’s Old-Fashioned Citron Preserve.

I used the extra melons to make Mrs. Benjamin Chew Howard‘s recipe for citron pickles, seasoned with vinegar, brown sugar, cinnamon, allspice, and cloves. Howard’s recipe yielded a tasty syrupy concoction that might be good for cocktails or other creative uses, but I was a bit at a loss for what to do with the pickled citron melon flesh. Snacking? Fans of pickled watermelon rind might say so, but I don’t tend to snack on something like this. I worried about it rotting in the fridge.

Louisville Kentucky Courier-Journal, 1953

I decided to put the “citron” to the test, as I had intended to do with Poist’s preserve. That recipe preserved the melon in a sugar syrup flavored with citrus peel. It could allegedly be used in cakes, like actual citron. Unfortunately, it molded before I got around to trying to bake with it.

What if I baked a cake with pickled citron? The idea sounded a little weird but I thought I’d try it anyway, to see just how well the citron melon could live up to its namesake.

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Cindy Knopp’s white sweet potato coconut pie

For 36 years, columnist and photographer Brice Stump wrote about life on the Eastern Shore. In his columns, he explored its history – including the Civil War, and pondered the petty tribulations of modern life.

On one topic in particular, Stump was passionate: White Hayman Sweet Potatoes. Having been raised on a farm, Stump admitted they aren’t easy to grow. But of their flavor, he sang the praises.

“Unlike the familiar orange-fleshed sweet potatoes that required marshmallows, brown sugar and lots of butter to enhance their nutty flavor, the Hayman tickles the palate with a natural, delicately sweet taste and heavenly texture,” Stump wrote in the Salisbury Daily Times in 1999. In that article, he interviewed Rev. Sally Bowen, a descendent of Daniel Hayman, the ship captain purported to have brought the potatoes from North Carolina to Maryland in the 1850s.

Although stories trace White Haymans to North Carolina, nary a trace of them can be found there now. White Haymans are a specialty of the Eastern Shore, “raised only for Shore consumers,” wrote Stump.

Eight years later he bemoaned the proliferation of O’Henrys appearing on the market, ironically “coming out of the Carolinas, apparently.” These pretenders were giving Haymans a bad name. An authenticity test was recommended: “If you put pressure down on your thumb and draw it over the face of a Hayman, it will ‘skin’ easily, whereas the O’Henry wont.”

If the difference is so stark, that casts a lot of doubt on my last attempt at a white sweet potato pie. This time around, my mom acquired some Haymans from Whiteraven’s Nest in Chincoteague, Virginia – along with several other varieties of sweet potato. So I used a blend. She was warned to cure them several weeks, in a warm and dry place, or else risk defeating the point of even tasting them.

Salisbury Daily Times, 2008
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Strawberry And Rhubarb Jam, Mrs. Olivia Harper Medders

The header for Miss Olivia Harper’s 1899 marriage announcement read “Wedded to a Marylander.” Olivia’s mother, Mary C. Harper, and her father, storekeeper George W. Harper, were both born in Delaware. But 1880 and 1910 censuses show the Harpers living in Kent County – Maryland, not Delaware, so the announcement title is somewhat curious. Olivia Harper herself was born in 1876, in Maryland. But that’s no matter. Olivia, daughter of a shopkeeper, married William Medders, who would eventually become a merchant himself.

His store became a famous local fixture for nearly 70 years.

Medders’ store on Maryland Historical Trust
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Peanut Butter and Jelly Cheesecake, Delores Brown

“For those gloomy days,” write Charles Britton in 1992, “when everything seems to be turning into dross, I have a note of encouragement to offer: We are living in the great age of cheesecake.”

His column, which was syndicated in newspapers across the country, remarked on cheesecake’s 1980s rise to stardom, citing the two latest books on the subject, as well as “a popular Southern California restaurant chain called the Cheesecake Factory.” In that article, Britton shared six recipes for different cheesecake variations.

Ten years earlier, Patricia Turner wrote in the Bridgewater Courier-News about two cheesecake cookbooks that were out at that time. Turner was somewhat less exhilarated about the possibility of cheesecake. Perhaps the golden age had not yet begun. Or perhaps it was the fact that Turner was on a diet and admitted to not having tried any of the recipes shared in her column.

One of those recipes was for a Peanut Butter and Jelly Cheesecake – a different version than the recipe that I encountered in “Country Classics Vol. 2,” a 1980s cookbook put out by the Old Friendship United Methodist Church in West Post Office Maryland.

This recipe’s contributor, Delores Brown, was too hard to pin down amongst the population of Worcester and nearby counties, despite the small size of the historic church she may have attended. All I know is that she shared this fun and slightly oddball cheesecake variation.

1934, 1933, 1935
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Pawpaw Pretzel Pie

I decided to do one last pawpaw recipe before the season is over. After last week’s pawpaw cream pie, I wondered what it would be like to cross it with strawberry pretzel salad.

When I approached the Two Boots Farm stand I felt a little bad. Colorful edible flowers sat alluringly displayed in plastic clamshells. Cartons of shisito peppers were laid out. Behind the pawpaw table, another table of offerings. When I reached out later, Elisa from Two Boots farm told me ” Yes, sometimes I think people oversee our flowers when they are hunting for the pawpaws (two very different customers really). But we do have a lot of social media followers that I suspect found us because of pawpaws but they started asking us for wedding flower quotes or joining our flower share. In September people flock to us for the pawpaws but if I look at the sales numbers cut flowers are still our best selling item this time of the year.”

I ended up working with pectin to make a vegetarian recipe that could easily be made vegan. It could also be made with milk gelatin (minus cinnamon) for those who don’t want to deal with the pectin.

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