Fresh Garden Corn Chowder, Ivy Neck

This rich corn soup is not unlike Elizabeth Ellicott Lea’s Corn Fricassee. The flavor of the corn is front and center (or, depending on your palate and your corn, the soup is bland).

The attribution in “Maryland’s Way” is “Mrs. Murray’s Bride’s Book, 1858.“ It is possible the recipe is to be found somewhere within the voluminous Cheston-Galloway papers at the Maryland Historical Society. The collection encompasses many descendants of Samuel Galloway, a Maryland merchant and slave trader in the 1700s.

Galloway owned an estate, Tulip Hill, in Anne Arundel County. His son James Cheston would build Ivy Neck nearby on the Rhode River in 1787. The homes remained within their large and tangled family tree for many generations.

Ivy Neck, Maryland Historical Trust

Mrs. Murray was born Mary Hollingsworth Morris somewhere down that family tree, at an intersection of cousins Anne Cheston and Dr. Caspar Morris. Tracing family connections demonstrates the many ties between Baltimore and Philadelphia families, and Philly is where the Morris family resided before settling at Ivy Neck, on the Rhode River in Anne Arundel County. 

Morris family Philadelphia home, The Morris family of Philadelphia

In 1844 the Morrises signed documents to gradually manumit all of the people that they had enslaved there. Four years later, Dr. Morris wrote a biography of abolitionist Margaret Mercer, an Anne Arundel County neighbor who worked with the controversial American Colonization Society. 

In Dr. Morris’ biography, he credits Mercer with influencing another local enslaver, Daniel Murray Esquire, to release his slaves. Murray then joined the efforts of the Colonization Society. There is still a county in Liberia named Maryland, a vestige of this attempt to “resettle” people who had in most cases become naturalized to North American culture and terrain.

Ivy Neck photo showing outbuildings, E.H. Pickering, loc.gov

It was Murray’s son, Henry M. Murray, who married Mary Hollingsworth Morris in 1856. The family lived at Ivy Neck, perhaps with Mary’s “bride’s book,” but also with the help of servants, many of whom were probably the same people manumitted by Mary’s parents. The Ivy Neck property has two different tenant houses, one of which was home to a man named Daniel Boston who cooked for the Murray’s daughter Cornelia and her family at Ivy Neck in the 1930s.

The house at Ivy Neck burned down in 1944, and part of the property eventually went to the Smithsonian Chesapeake Bay Center for Environmental Studies.
Well, there you have it, “Fresh Garden Corn Chowder.”

Recipe:

6 ears fresh corn
6 cups milk
3 egg yolks
3 Tablespoons butter
1.5 Teaspoons salt
1.5 Teaspoons sugar
white pepper
chives
paprika

Shuck corn and remove silk, then grate corn off the cob into the soup pot; add milk and heat slowly. Beat egg yolks and work the soft butter into them; add a little of the hot corn and milk mixture to egg and butter, beating well; then stir this into the soup. Add salt, sugar and a dash of pepper and bring to a simmer. Serve hot with chopped chives and paprika.

Recipe adapted from “Maryland’s Way”, “Mrs. Murray’s Bride’s Book, 1858”