I think a lot about the impact of digital documents on interpretation of history. Which items are and are not easily available to online inevitably steer the course of my research and my writing. For example: at some point someone in the New York Public Library decided to scan “Tested Maryland Recipes.” The public domain…
Dr. Edna Dorothy Meshke, like most of the contributors to “Maryland Cooking,” was a home economist. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: many of us have no idea how much we owe to Home Economics educators for creating, sharing, and fine-tuning classic recipes, and for raising the expectations of what a recipe…
A few weeks ago I came across a recipe for something called “Christmas Bell Salad.” The process entailed cooking canned pears in melted cinnamon candy until the pears were red and cinnamon-flavored, and then serving the pears with dyed-green cream-cheese piped at the top to make the pear look like a bell. I don’t usually…
Mrs. Brown, the first-nameless protagonist of playwright Chandos Fulton’s 1873 novelette, responds witheringly to the news that a friend’s daughter has wed a man of modest means. “It was a love-match, I suppose,” her friend Mrs. Campbell told her, and Mrs. Brown “did not deign a reply.” As the plot of Fulton’s novel unfolds, Mrs….
“Next to loving, I suppose that eating is the most fascinating as well as the most deadly form of indoor sport practiced in America, or anywhere. Perhaps I should have placed eating first, for many folks have dyspepsia so badly that they have forgotten how to love and are so disagreeable that no one loves…