The header for Miss Olivia Harper’s 1899 marriage announcement read “Wedded to a Marylander.” Olivia’s mother, Mary C. Harper, and her father, storekeeper George W. Harper, were both born in Delaware. But 1880 and 1910 censuses show the Harpers living in Kent County – Maryland, not Delaware, so the announcement title is somewhat curious. Olivia Harper herself was born in 1876, in Maryland. But that’s no matter. Olivia, daughter of a shopkeeper, married William Medders, who would eventually become a merchant himself.
His store became a famous local fixture for nearly 70 years.
Note: This interview is from April. I had the pleasure of seeing Bernard Herman speak not long before we all began isolating. I really enjoyed reading his book but had a hard time writing anything expository to go with this interview. The book makes a beautiful gift so I did my best to get this together for the holiday season.Please support independent booksellers.
Photographs care of The University of North Carolina Press
Summer is behind us, but thinking of the Eastern Shore puts me in a “late-July” mindset. Like many people who live on the “other side” of the bay, my experience of much of the Delmarva peninsula is a relatively narrow one. I was fortunate enough to grow up spending much of my summers in Chincoteague, where my grandfather was accepted among the fishermen.
In his little trailer, my extended family enjoyed lots of fish, tomatoes, corn, and so much more of what the region had to offer. My appreciation of these tastes and the associated memories left a lasting impression. The sound of tree-frogs at night still lulls me into a peaceful and safe state of mind.
More recently I began venturing out on long drives down through Virginia’s Eastern Shore. I found it to be a mesmerizing place. Route 13 runs along old railroad tracks. Rows of magenta crape myrtles sometimes line the road. Monoculture seems omnipresent – soy and sorghum dominate the land. Beyond the fields are roads leading to a diversity of landscapes. Some overgrown byways reveal faint traces of a different past – farmhouses and churches being digested by the marshy earth. The occasional grand manor still stands.
In one direction the ocean roars, in the other the bay can sometimes have an almost eerie calmness. And yet life is buzzing all around – the smells and sounds plants and animals living and dying.
To a wannabe writer like me, it feels like “a place you write about.”
Once again a second visit with a cookbook reveals a new dimension to it: this time its the 1973 “Rosemary Hills International Community Cookbook,” compiled by Gwendolyn Coffield and Juanita Hamby. The book is an early celebration of the DC suburbs’ growing diversity.
In 2002, the Washington Post ran an article about the Lyttonsville neighborhood surrounding the Rosemary Hills School. The article called the Silver Spring neighborhood an “ethnic enclave” with “hidden appeal.”
Gwendolyn’s sister Charlotte is quoted in that article, reflecting on the ways Lyttonsville had changed over the years. The historically Black neighborhood, built on land that had been acquired in the 1850s by a free Black man named Samuel Lytton, has been home to several generations of the Coffield family.
Sabillasville is a small town on the Pennsylvania border, north of Frederick. I forget where I got this cookbook but it seemed like a good one to learn about a new place and cover some more “Western” Maryland recipes. Alas, things did not pan out so well.
The town of Sabillasville was officially founded in 1813, and named for Savilla Zollinger, a wife of one of the early Swiss settlers to the area. I can’t find anything about when the St. John’s Church opened there. The cookbook, “The Best in Cooking in Sabillasville,” appears to be from the 1960s. I would have suspected the 1950s, but there is an ad for the Shamrock Restaurant in Thurmont. The Shamrock opened in 1963 (and closed in 2019.)
Although Maryland’s history of celebrated restaurants, hotels and caterers may have influenced the cuisine that we enjoy to this day, there are very few recipes that can be directly tied to the early chefs.
Chefs tended to work more intuitively and from experience. Recipes – even the relatively vague ones found in 19th-century cookbooks, simply weren’t necessary.
By the time Frederick Phillip Stieff and others began to transcribe and collect recipes from famed establishments, a generation of Baltimore caterers had come and gone.
Instead, that legacy is woven throughout the recipes collected by well-to-do housewives and circulated in church cookbooks, eventually passing traces of restaurant prestige into everyday meals.
The name of one specific restaurant does appear in many Maryland recipe manuscripts, church and corporate cookbooks alike, and is not a Maryland restaurant at all.
Delmonico’s in 1903, Detroit Publishing Co., loc.gov
