Beet Relish, Miss Helen Palen

I thought we’d take things back into the 20th century this week.

Among the “treasures” acquired in 1960 by the Maryland Department of the Enoch Pratt Free Library (”Maryland Room Acquires ‘Treasures’”, Baltimore Sun, November 1960) is a copy of a cookbook put out in 1948 by the Maryland Home Economics Association. Much like the “Secrets of Southern Maryland Cooking” book, it is written in many different hands with varying degrees of legibility.

Entitled “Maryland Cooking,” the book manages to pack 310 recipes. Three are for beaten biscuits, one is for crab cakes. “Stuffed Country Ham” is there too. The book is also notable in that it draws from regions of Maryland where less community or historic cookbooks had been produced. One recipe for “Cornish Saffron Bread,” is prefaced with the description that it was introduced to Frostburg by settlers from Cornwall in the mid 19th century. Ethel Grove from Washington County appropriately contributed a recipe for “Maple Bavarian Cream.” Each of Maryland’s counties had a committee gathering recipes for the book.

The cover illustration was done by Richard Q. Yardley, an editorial illustrator for the Sun, whose illustrations also adorn the Sun’s “Fun with Food” and “Fun with Sea Food” books from the 1960s.

The purpose of “Maryland Cooking” was to gain funds towards a Washington, DC Headquarters for the American Home Economics Association, and hopefully to provide scholarships to help “finance the education of girls who want to become home economists.”

After cooking schools had codified the domestic arts into a sort of ‘science for women,’ this type of education became offered to a younger audience through private schools or as part of public high school education. Newspaper articles marveled, sometimes condescendingly, at this new branch of education. In May 1913, a Sun reporter visited the cooking classes, which were taught at Western High School in Baltimore, and observed 120 pupils, “Baltimore’s fairest,” studying “ways to capture the heart of the male of the species.” The reporter declared that even a “hardened misogynist” would be charmed by the epicurean meals prepared by the students.

A follow up story in June remarked on the “awful fuss they make over a panful of pie.”

Home Economics at Iowa State College, 1942, Jack Delano, loc.gov

The housekeeping department, the June article continued, was conducted by Miss Helen Palen(1883-????), the “presiding genius” of a “dainty little flat” used to teach cleaning methods and laundry, although Palen noted that she did not expect the girls to have to do their own laundry.

Palen was still teaching housekeeping at the school in 1919, when the Sun reported on how the school was training girls “for future usefulness.”

Palen’s commitment to home economics education ran deep, and she appears in Johns Hopkins circulars as attending courses for teachers throughout the late 1910s. She served as the president of the Maryland Home Economics Association from 1918-1920.

That was nearly 30 years before the publication of “Maryland Cooking,” but it is her recipe for Beet Relish that I turned to to preserve my spring beets and cabbage.

Similar recipes appear in newspapers at the turn of the 20th century, but the European origins couldn’t be much more obvious. The beets (and in this case, a healthy amount of sugar…) sweeten up the horseradish and the cabbage mellows the whole thing out. The most similar condiment I could find online is called “tsvikly” in the Ukraine.

I naively thought that my backyard horseradish would be sufficient at first. When I dug it up and found it puny and pitiful, I had to go to a few stores to find horseradish that was unadulterated with oils or other additives. I ultimately found it in the seafood section.

I had forgotten the joy of a nice oniony roast beef sandwich with horseradish and greens. The relish also made a nice cheddar grilled cheese.

I’ll be making more out of “Maryland Cooking.” The American Home Economics Association has since become the American Association of Family & Consumer Sciences. The archives of the now-defunct Maryland division is now housed at the University of Maryland Hornbake Library, where several copies of the book can also be found.

Lucky for me and this blog, it’s become pretty socially acceptable to make an “awful fuss over a panful of pie.”