Recipe seekers: For a better Smearcase cheesecake recipe post, click here! While many Baltimoreans get excitable about the annual Peach Cake tradition, Peach Cake’s Plain Jane cousin Smearcase gets somewhat overlooked. I do mean that literally. With a similar German origin to Peach Cake, Smearcase cake can often be found in the same bakery cases,…
This summer we took a vacation to Cincinnati (with many stops on the way). It seems very de rigeur these days for travelers through southwestern WV to sample their famous regional hot dog establishments, so that is what we did. With some guidance from the West Virginia Hot Dog Blog, we saw some sights, ate…
“To say that [Baltimore] is an ugly city is to give an altogether false impression, for ugliness ordinarily is construed as a negative quality, the absence of beauty. The astounding, the incredible, the downright fabulous ugliness of Baltimore, on the other hand, is distinctively a positive quality. The amazed newcomer to the city is almost…
This rich corn soup is not unlike Elizabeth Ellicott Lea’s Corn Fricassee. The flavor of the corn is front and center (or, depending on your palate and your corn, the soup is bland). The attribution in “Maryland’s Way” is “Mrs. Murray’s Bride’s Book, 1858.“ It is possible the recipe is to be found somewhere within…
I’ve never really been a “cake person.” For baking and eating, my memories tend to reside in the pie zone. Then last year, when I graduated from reading the published canon of Maryland cookbooks on to the special collections at Maryland Historical Society, I began to notice a high ratio of cake recipes in personal…