Month: June 2023

Corn Cakes & Broiled Tomatoes A La Elkridge

A reader contacted me looking for a caramelized broiled tomato recipe. They knew it had a connection to a country club. They also recalled that the club had had a history of discriminatory policies.

I checked my database. Fourteen recipes for broiled tomatoes. Among them: Mrs. Charles Gibson‘s recipe, Mrs. Spencer Watkins‘, BGE, The Baltimore Sun recipe contest… and then a recipe in “Wine and Dine with the Lake Roland Garden Club,” for “Broiled Tomatoes A La Elkridge.”

There it is.

The Elkridge Club was founded in 1878 as a fox-hunting club. Purebred hounds of elite lineage were shipped over from the UK. One history book about the Elkridge Club details the family trees of these distinguished hounds. Clearly, the 40 or so founding members envisioned themselves as Maryland nobility, and for all intents and purposes, they were.

The club moved to the area that would become Roland Park in 1888. According to the history on their website, “Elkridge leased 54 acres at $800 per year on Charles Street Avenue from the estate of Governor Augustus Bradford, and moved into the new clubhouse which was to be its permanent home. This acreage extended north from the entrance gate to the line between the present 5th and 6th holes. Governor Bradford had purchased 125 acres at the site for $12,000 in 1854, and had built a large house on the hill just west of the first green.”

Activities gradually expanded to include golfing, tennis, baseball, and trap shooting.

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Crab Cakes, Mrs. Nell C. Westcott

“[The Eastern Shore’s] biggest booster lives in Chestertown,” wrote W.C. Thurston in the preface to his book The Eastern Shore (of Maryland) In Song and Story. She was “a fair daughter of the Shore who typed two stories for us when we needed only one.”

Westcott contributed two odes to the book, one to the Eastern Shore in general, and one written to honor the Ann McKim, the “first of the Baltimore clippers”, “adored by all the skippers.”

Westcott was born Nellie Charlotte Schneider in 1887 to Louis H Schneider and Nellie S Ernesty, residents of Washington DC. In 1900, Nell was living in New York with her mother and teaching music. According to Nell’s mothers 1932 obituary, the elder Nellie was founder of her town library and active in the civic and social life of Pleasant Valley, New York.

In 1910 or 1911, Nell married Fred B. Westcott from New Jersey. Their daughter Dorothy was born in 1911. The couple and their children settled back in Chestertown by 1930. There, Nell worked for the government in the employment office and the Chamber of Commerce, but found time to pen a column in the Chestertown Enterprise of tidbits, notes, and praise for her home region. As secretary for the Chamber of Commerce, she had dealings in issues ranging from poultry farms brokering Thanksgiving turkeys to the groundwork for the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.

Nell C. Westcott was just the type of person to end up on the radar of Frederick Phillip Stieff when he was compiling Eat, Drink & Be Merry in Maryland. That book includes Nell’s recipes for Crab Cakes, Potato Rolls, Oyster Pie, Lemon Butter, and Rusks.

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Lemon Ice Box Pie, Mrs. Harry C. Michael

Next time you drop a few ice cubes into a cold beverage think of this: many early-20th-century consumers would be wary of your “artificial” ice. Unless of course, your ice happens to be harvested from a lake or a mountain somewhere.

The technology to create ice from water was first developed in the mid-1800s, but it caught on slowly. The ice trade continued to collect ice from natural stores and ship it around the country.

It’s no surprise that manufactured ice might scare consumers. Think of how strange it must have seemed. As always, industry had to sway the public. The Maryland Ice Company took out an ad in the Baltimore Sun in 1892 declaring that “manufactured ice is not only purer, but will last longer and produce equally as much cold as ‘natural ice.”

1888

Apparently, this was still a concern in 1923 when an American Ice company ad in the Evening Sun explained to readers that “American Ice is… made from filtered water and frozen in sanitary plants,” and that it was “very real, absolutely pure Ice.” The ad stated that American Ice had nine plants in Baltimore “all making clean, pure, healthful ice.”

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Wineberry* Jam, Mrs. Franklin Wilson manuscript

When I looked through my database for a raspberry jelly recipe, I noticed that most of them had the addition of currants. This makes sense because the currants contain pectin to help the recipe “jell,” and the currants also add a little bit of tangy depth. This was particularly welcome in my case because I was not working with raspberries at all, but the less flavorful (but invasive and abundant) wineberry.

Interestingly, raspberries are native to North America but also to Asia Minor. They had already spread throughout Europe long before colonization.

It’s no surprise then, that raspberry-currant jams and jellies appear in the oldest Maryland cookbook manuscripts. With only three ingredients, there is not much variation. The distinction of jellies like this depended a lot on how good the cook was at clarifying the jelly. The more transparent, the more luxurious.

Virginia Appleton Wilson

Like most of the more common people of those times, I lean towards preserves that don’t waste the fruit’s pulp. But with wineberries growing free and abundant, why not live like the other half!

My chosen recipe comes care of Mrs. Franklin Wilson’s recipe manuscript at the Maryland Center for History and Culture. The Wilson family collection is a huge trove of legal documents, scrapbooks, photographs, and letters.

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Beef Roulades, Edyth Malin

The Dakota Cheese Company was flying high in 1983. With 11.5 million in sales of mozzarella and provolone, the 12-year-old company was expected to continue growing. Dakota Cheese president James Dee credited his government contracts for his company’s success. That success was enabling expansion into private markets. Dee expected Dakota Cheese to score a big contract with “a major chain of pizza parlors” soon.

Five years later, success gave way to disgrace. Farmers stopped delivering milk. Dee was forced to sell off his company’s assets to Associated Milk Producers Inc. No self-respecting pizza parlor would be associated with Dakota Cheese. Not after they’d been accused of defrauding the government.

The 1988 indictment claimed that by using calcium caseinate as an ingredient in the cheese purchased for school lunch contracts, Dakota Cheese had misled the government and violated the FDA cheese regulations.

A lab near Philadelphia completed an analysis of the cheese. They declared the mozzarella to be “phony.”

The company was done for.

But the Philadelphia scientists were just getting started. The analysis had them inspired. Perhaps mozzarella cheese could be altered within the confines of FDA law. Perhaps it could be improved upon, made lower fat, without sacrificing taste and texture. The lab took on the name “The Mozarella Group.”

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