Month: December 2023

Mayonnaise Cake, Marylee Felton

The Baltimore Sun ran a four-part series in the spring of 1988. The articles were about Baltimore City Public Schools, and they covered the usual woes we still contend with today – attendance, student performance, accountability, and standardized tests. The series was entitled “School Maze,” and was intended to “nettle defenders of the status quo.”

One family member of a student was surprised. They wrote a letter to share their positive view of Glenmount Primary School: “…when one enters the building [they notice] large well-made pictures on both walls of what the youngsters do and current events… Quietness is the order of the day. The PTA and other groups take part in the school work.” The reader, Frank J. Huebel shared anecdotes of his great-granddaughter learning math and reading and writing. “All of this tells me that Glenmount is a well-run school and that the youngsters are learning the basics, in spite of the ‘School Maze.'”

Huebel was not alone in his positive view of the school. A 1985 story about a blind student’s guide dog Lavette quoted the dog’s owner, Nancy Jaslow. “Everyone knows not to touch or play with a guide dog. My principal, Marylee Felton loves dogs and loves having Lavette around.”

A few decades after Lillian Lottier, Marylee Felton was taking the same path: serving the city and community through a career in education. Her position as a teacher and later as a principal would have her face school fires, understaffing, overcrowding, state politics, and all of the other tribulations faced by educators.

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Ginger Pound Cakes, McCormick Manual of Cookery c. 1912

“Some one has said that every big man has a hobby,” according to an article in the Baltimore Sun in 1915. “Willoughby M. McCormick is no exception to the rule… He has two hobbies that go together. One is food quality in connection with food purity, and the other is domestic science, or the science of cookery. Under his direction [McCormick Spice Company] has published a splendid manual of Cookery.”

McCormick’s Manual of Cookery was first published in the early 1910s. By 1914, it was retitled “Bee Brand Manual of Cookery: The Blue Book of The Culinary Art.”

The 1915 article in the Baltimore Sun boasted that the manual was “full of recipes from the best cooks of Maryland and the Virginias, in which dishes are preserved from the Colonial period—dishes which gave the South the gastronomic championship of the world.” Once again, “Colonial” was used as a euphemism for antebellum times. Even the McCormick cookery book capitalized on a romanticized vision of Southern hospitality.

McCormick sponsored window at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, 1946. Digital Maryland

McCormick shared some interesting opinions in the article. He didn’t think the Pure Foods law went far enough. His brand, he said, used more vanilla than legally required in their extract. He liked for consumers to visit his plant downtown to get firsthand confidence in his products. “Each consumer is our personal customer,” he said. He felt that “purity and quality and preparation of food are at the bottom of the misery or happiness of a nation of people.”

McCormick believed that men should teach their daughters about finance. “They do that nicely, over in France,” he said. “In this country women spend money as if it were nothing.” As an example, he mentioned women who bought artificial vanilla extract “from old women and cripples who peddle from door to door.” The Sun entitled this section of the article “Spending Money Foolishly.”

The article’s writer visited that McCormick plant and was enchanted. “A journey through the McCormick house would pay anyone who desired swift transportation from the humdrum modern business life to the atmosphere of the Far East, with its romance and fragrances,” they wrote, describing the plant as “the Kingdom of the Sounds of Odors, where very delight wafted to the nostrils is a song or a poem.”

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Milk Punch, Cookery Notebook of George Dobbin Brown

The twenty-five recipes for Milk Punch in my database all contain similar ingredients: milk, rum or brandy, nutmeg, sugar.

For years now I’ve been intending to make one of these recipes for eggnog’s cousin (or rival, depending on who you ask).

It was only this year that I noticed that these punch recipes, with their similar ingredients, fall into two different camps, with wildly different results.

The recipe I chose is one of several that involve the addition of citrus juice and peel. The milk curdles and is strained off, leaving a clarified product. The result is not so much eggnog’s cousin as a distant DNA relative.

I just couldn’t resist the appeal of a process to turn a cloudy mixture of milk, lemons, and liquor into a clear beverage with a long shelf life.

Clarified Milk Punch dates to the 17th century, and appears in some of Maryland’s oldest cookbooks. The two recipes in Mrs. B.C. Howard’s 1873 cookbook “Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen” are both entitled “India Milk Punch.” Both end not by boasting about the flavor, but the fact that the punch “will keep for a year or more.”

Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen, 1873

A book of recipes donated by Dr. George Dobbin Brown to the Maryland Center of History and Culture dates to around the same time. It’s Milk Punch recipe is very similar, with the addition of nutmeg. This is the recipe that I followed.

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Stuffed Cabbage With Parsley Cream Sauce, Mrs. Edwin Obrecht

Cabbage stuffed with meat is a classic combination, with variations all around the world. There’s Polish Gołąbki, cabbage rolls filled with meat and topped in tomato sauce. A Chinese version is stuffed with pork and mushrooms.

Early American versions involve stuffing the meat inside the cabbage, as The Townsends and Chef Walter Staib have both demonstrated on their shows.

I’ve made at least one other version of stuffed cabbage myself, and it is delicious— if unnecessarily finicky.

The recipe may have been a little old-fashioned by 1953, but Mrs. Edwin Obrecht contributed hers to “Random Ruxton Recipes,” compiled by the Church of the Good Shepherd. The church boasted a well-to-do congregation, and almost all of the recipe contributors I’ve researched were prominent in Baltimore newspapers. The original is fairly rare. I accessed it at the Enoch Pratt Free Library. Another version of the cookbook was printed in 1977.

Mrs. Obrecht was born Doris Laura Merle in 1919. Her grandparents were German. Her father, Andrew Merle, was the president of a distillery firm. According to Merle’s 1965 obituary, he “spent the Prohibition years as a broker of medicinal spirits” and then launched his firm, Standard Distillers Products, Inc., when Prohibition was repealed.

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