• Baltimore Peach Cake**

    This recipe for an alternate version of Baltimore Peach Cake** comes from “Black-Eyed Susan Country,” another popular Maryland fund-raising cookbook. This particular book, first printed in 1987, raised money for St. Agnes Hospital. Onetime St. Agnes Auxiliary president Mary Parga was a volunteer at the White House, and used her connections to compile the book’s notable “VIP”…

  • |

    Free State Oyster Omelet

    This recipe comes from a popular cookbook produced by the Maryland Seafood Marketing Authority. First produced in 1974, the book was developed with the aid of “state seafood home economist” Beverly Butler in order to “expand the role of the Chesapeake Bay seafood industry as a major contributor to the state’s economy.” At the time,…

  • Deviled Crab

    Crab-cakes may be king now, but it wasn’t always so. From the 1800′s right on up through the 1950′s, if you wanted to impress some guests, you’d serve them crab meat picked from the crab, mixed with an assortment of seasonings, packed back into the crab shell with some breadcrumbs on top and baked until…

  • White Clam Sauce

    Outside of the German peach cake, or the Indian chutney that made its way into Mrs. B.C. Howard’s recipe collection, non-English and African influences aren’t always obvious in the recipes I work from. A lot of cooking traditions were passed down orally in immigrant communities, or else handwritten recipe manuscripts of everyday citizens didn’t make…