This is another recipe from the glamorous hotel era – this time from Cumberland, Maryland. At the time of the publication of “Eat, Drink & Be Merry in Maryland” in the 1930s, Cumberland was a booming town connecting the rest of Maryland to the west, particularly mineral-rich western Maryland, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Trains, the National Road, and the C&O Canal moved freight and people from DC & Baltimore through this mountain town, and many of those people expected to wine and dine in style just as they had in Baltimore and on the train-ride itself.
To that end, the Fort Cumberland Hotel was built in 1916. This “typical small city hotel” offered middle-class residents of western Maryland a chance to feast on Sunday dinners of “Filet of Sole Au Vin Blanc,” “String Beans Au Beurre,” and yes, “Chicken A La Maryland.”
Early advertisements boasted the hotel as “fireproof,” a legitimate concern for the times but amusing and baffling today. The hotel ultimately did experience a fire in 1952 but it was minor, and the Cumberland Times reported that “no panic ensued.”
The Fort Cumberland Hotel was visited by no less than future President Harry Truman during a 1928 journey to dedicate twelve “Madonna of the Trail” monuments along the “National Old Trails Road.”
Digging into the past of hotel manager Ivan Poling, who shared this recipe with Frederick Phillip Stieff, provides some more damning evidence (if the racist cartoons weren’t enough) on Stieff’s character – if this is the company he kept. A businessman from a family involved in the coal business and then the hotel trade, Poling was the owner or manager of many hotels throughout Maryland and his home state of West Virginia. A news item from Fairmont, WV in 1924 indicates that Poling was almost certainly a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He was fined $500 for his part in a conspiracy to kidnap and batter a black man suspected of making advances on a white woman. Several of the other people charged were “officials” in the Klan. It is unusual that this incident made it into the news at that place and time – there is no way of knowing how he conducted himself thereafter. Upon his death in 1948, Cumberland obituaries recalled his “genial personality and friendly interest in people.”
Today the Fort Cumberland Hotel is a senior’s home. The population of Cumberland peaked in 1940 and has been steadily declining since. Perhaps some of the seniors living there can remember the time when the hotel offered another luxurious stop for the wealthy, and the town of Cumberland was bustling not just with wealthy travelers, but with the chefs and waiters, miners, and factory workers who made their lavish lifestyle possible.
Recipe:
- 1 duckling
- carrots
- onion
- celery
- butter or lard
- ½ cup currant jelly
- stock
- 2 oranges
- 1 lemon
- flour
Brown whole duckling, along with carrots, onion and celery in a saucepan with lard or butter. Sprinkle with a little flour and cook until the flour is well browned; add some tomato puree and stock, cover the pan and put in moderate oven until the duckling is well done. Remove the duck from the sauce and stir in a cupful of currant jelly and the juice of two oranges and one lemon. Peel strips off of the orange and lemon peel and boil until tender. Add them to gravy, serve over the duck and garnish with quartered orange.
Notes:
Although I adapted these instructions slightly (for legal reasons), they were equally vague in the original. I had no idea how much of anything to use. I got the duck at Potung. There are lots of kinds of duck and the one I bought is probably quite different from those served in Maryland in the early 1900s. This recipe is available online in more decipherable details.
