My Great Grandmother was born in Hancock in 1915. I guess that’s what drew me to pick up the 1970s or 80s era “Hancock Elementary School Cookbook.” Hancock is a small town with one main road (Main Street), but it’s an important way stop in Western Maryland and has been for centuries. In the 1730s,…
“A calico-covered journal filled with handwritten recipes” left by her paternal grandmother inspired a high-schooler to write an entire book. The year was 2010. I was starting and lazily giving up on Old Line Plate. Meanwhile, Grace Kenneth Collins was finishing a chapter every month on a book filled with stories and recipes. Presumably, the…
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…
“[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…
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…