I first became aware of the work of Carrie Helms Tippen at the Baltimore Book Festival, where she was in conversation with Hannah Howard and Soleil Ho in 2018. That was my introduction to Tippen and Howard’s work, but now I count all three as people I admire. Tippen was discussing her book Inventing Authenticity:…
The Mayflower Hotel in Washington DC has an oddly long Wikipedia page. It’s almost as long as the page about the Watergate Complex. It mentions trysts of Presidents Kennedy and Clinton. Presidential inaugural balls. A Nazi plot to sabotage the US that ended in betrayal. J. Edgar Hoover eating the same lunch every day: “chicken…
Suzy Arbogast contributed a peculiarly-named recipe to the “Cooking the Severn Way… Supplement” cookbook. Entitled “Dick Arbogast’s Male Liberated Pie,” it called for condensed milk, Cool Whip, and a can of pie filling, layered in in a pre-baked pie shell. At the end of the recipe, Suzy wrote “Preparation time: 8 min. Total Calories: 10,000.”…
The memory of the Louisiana Ring Cakes, delivered directly to customers from Rice’s Bakery trucks, never faded.
There are those for whom a recipe contest is a footnote. Many contestants walk off the experience with a fun story and perhaps a triumph, and their names enshrined into a token cookbook. For others, however, the competition is a way of life. These food mavens work the circuit of county fairs, recipe contests and…