Fairly early in the pandemic, I moved to a new house. I felt conflicted, leaving the 1880s rowhouse on Howard Street that I’d bought in 2009. But it had some issues that were becoming bothersome. The dining room was cramped and dark, and the kitchen small and awkward, making the increasing Old Line Plate-related press…
One of the many changes that the pandemic caused in me was a reversal of my austere policy on hard-copies of cookbooks. Where once I had been donating my more rare books and avoiding paying for anything I could view in a library, I suddenly had the urge to build up my home collection more…
If constituent services is any measure of a councilperson’s effectiveness then there is little debating that Mary Pat Clarke had a long and successful career. I once spoke to Mary Pat Clarke and mentioned that I had seen this recipe, for “Fudge-It,” in “Good things are Cooking in Greater Homewood,” a cookbook produced in 1973 by the GHCC. She professed to not be much of a cook. I have to admit this fudge recipe isn’t the most magical, fudgey candy around, but hey – its in the name.
“Gumbo Filet Powder is made of the tender young leaves of the sassafras,” wrote Jane Gilmor Howard in her 1873 cookbook Fifty Years in A Maryland Kitchen, “picked in the Spring, and dried carefully in the shade as you do herbs; powdered fine, bottled and corked tight. It is much used in New Orleans.” This…
Mary was a suffragette, also championing suffrage’s companion cause, temperance. Stereotypes aside, she seemed to have some fun.