“Maryland Cooking,” a 1948 book produced by the Maryland Home Economics Association, is certainly a classic documentation of our region. I’ve reached for this book again and again for inspiring recipes, and have uncovered some of the lives of the teachers and home economists behind each handwritten recipe I’ve made. The book has some interesting…
Sources for this regional delicacy are getting fewer and fewer as the years go by.
Helen Avalynne Gibson and John Millard Tawes didn’t have a decadent wedding. The newspapers ran no reports about Helen’s dress, or the flowers she carried, or the people who attended. In fact, the union didn’t appear in the paper at all until nearly two months later, when the Baltimore Sun ran a small article entitled,…
The Manuscript Cookbooks Survey describes the handwriting in the “Hoffman Cook Book” as having an “unvarying mood.” That is one way to put it. The text is dense. Impenetrable. To my eyes: a nightmare. The exhausting handwriting likely belonged to Lydia A. Hoffman Smyser, who was born in Maryland in 1837 and ended up in…
“You don’t cry when someone dies,” Elsie Czerkovich told the Baltimore Sun in April 1974. “You rejoice because he is going to heaven to live with the Lord.” It was the day after Easter, and Czerkovich was gathering with other worshipers from the congregation of the Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Church for a picnic. Women…