Evening Sun food columnist Virginia Roeder generally knew what she was talking about. In 1962 she announced that “a new cookbook star has appeared on the Maryland culinary horizon.”
The book she was writing about would go on to earn a time-tested place on many Baltimore kitchen bookshelves. My next-door neighbors have a copy. A former coworker told me that she’s “seen it on [her] godmother’s shelf, so it must be good!” My own copy was donated to me from the cookbook collection of the late Dr. Patricia Smith. The book is well-used, its cover fallen off and held on with a ribbon. Opening it is like opening a gift.
The book in question, “Ambrosia & Nectar,” was compiled by the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Community, and as far as I know, it was the first cookbook representation of Baltimore’s Greek community, one of the largest Greek communities in the United States.
Greek immigration to Baltimore gained steam in the years between 1930 and 1950, and families moved to a neighborhood in Highlandtown known as “the Hill.”
In 1975, the Baltimore Sun covered a story about a road in “Greektown, which is Baltimorese for that part of Highlandtown beyond what everyone calls ‘the underpass.'”
Citizens took pride in the moniker. “The majority of people around here are Greek. They speak Greek. The main church is the Greek church. Most of the businessmen are Greeks. Whether we call it that or not, this is Greektown,” said Jimmy Hajimihalis in 1979. “So we decided to call it what everybody knows it is.”
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