Category: sources

Sources: Community Cookbooks

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Community cookbooks are a mixed blessing for me.
On one hand they’re such a fantastic window into the kitchens of the more middle-class citizens as opposed to the fabulous lifestyles of “Eat, Drink & Be Merry in Maryland” or “Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen.”

Flipping through the pages you can see changing trends, adventurous cooking and old family recipes, and pride and love expressed in (mostly) housewives feeding their family and friends.

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The Park School Cook Book (1964), Art Work Miss Grace Van Order

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Loyola Recipes(1974), sketches by Eileen F. Bolgiano

On the other hand there are HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of these books, churches and schools making slight updates, revising year after year and it’s a bit hard to keep up with or to fit into bookshelf and budget.

According to “Food & Wine”:

The first community cookbook was published during the Civil War. Yankee women determined to raise money for field hospitals organized themselves into what they called “Sanitation Commissions” and devised a way to make their domestic skills marketable: At a fair held in Philadelphia in 1864, they offered their own recipes under the title A Poetical Cook-Book…

After the war, women’s clubs organized cookbook projects to benefit widows, veterans and orphans. By 1915, as many as 6,000 community cookbooks had been published in the United States, and women were raising money to fund kindergartens and promote temperance and other political causes.

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Magician in the Kitchen(1980), Federated Garden Clubs of Maryland. drawing: Mrs. David MacTaggart, Jr., Gibson Island

One of the oldest Maryland community cookbooks available on Google Books is “Tested Maryland Recipes,” compiled and published by the Ladies of the Presbyterian Church, Chesapeake City Maryland, that book contains assorted classics of Maryland cooking such as white potato pie as well as household advice such as tips “to keep ice.”

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Tested Maryland Recipes

Queen Anne Goes to the Kitchen is perhaps one of the more famous of Maryland Community Cookbooks. It was first published in 1962 by The Episcopal Church Women of St. Paul’s Parish in Queen Anne’s County. That book bears many Maryland ancestral names and an assortment of contemporary and family recipes as well as some nice illustrations.

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Queen Anne Goes to the Kitchen, Artwork: Stephanie Thompson, Sally Clark, Hallie Rugg

However, it takes an assortment of these types of cookbooks to compile a reasonable cross-section of Maryland food. In some school cookbooks we might find a more diverse array of names suggesting the ongoing immigrant contribution to Maryland menus.

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Magician in the Kitchen(1980), Federated Garden Clubs of Maryland, Recipe Sketch Mrs. William G. Hill, Jr., Garden Club of Frederick

For the time being, I try to draw the line at buying books published after 1990. It’s a pretty arbitrary rule although it is likely that the proliferation of food blogs, cooking websites, and the internet recipe commentariat have chipped away at the vitality of a community cookbook in a typical household in that span of time. Meanwhile, thousands of community cookbooks continue to float around indefinitely, finding their way into the hands of historians and fanatics.

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Black-Eyed Susan Country(1987), Published by the Saint Agnes Hospital Auxiliary, art James E. Toher, M.D.

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Mrs. Jas S Hopper (Ella Griffith), editor of “Tested Maryland Recipes, Bethel Cemetry, Chesapeake City (findagrave.com)

Fricassee of Rabbit, Mrs. B.C. Howard

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“Fricassee or fricassée /ˈfrɪkəsiː/[1] is a method of cooking meat in which it is cut up, sautéed and braised, and served with its sauce, traditionally a white sauce.” (Wikipedia)

In the recipe for Pizza Chicken I introduced burgersub’s chicken allergy. This allergy also includes turkey and other fowl. As a result of it, rabbit has become the other white meat of our household.

If, like us, you insist upon eating meat, rabbit is a somewhat more sustainable option than the alternatives. And if, unlike us, you care about fats or health or whatever, rabbit is so low in fat that one could die from eating it.
I wouldn’t say I’m an expert exactly. Lexington Market has several stands that sell rabbit but they all peddle the same frozen rabbits, probably from the same source, all at the same cost.

They get the job done.

By far, my preferred treatment of rabbit is to put it in the slow-cooker, whole, with some oil, seasonings and liquid and let it go for several hours.
The result is that the meat comes right off the bone. When dealing with rabbit, this advantage can not be overstated.

In fact, if I were to make this fricassee again, I would probably complete the whole first step in the slow cooker. Perhaps use stock instead of dealing with the onion and parsley. Also I would not cut the bacon into tiny bits that are impossible to deal with.

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This fricassee recipe came from “Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen” by Mrs. Benjamin Chew Howard, aka Jane Gilmor.

Here in Baltimore, the name speaks for itself.

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Jane Grant Gilmor Howard by Thomas Sully

This popular classic Maryland cookbook was printed and reprinted over the years, with a revised “for modern times” edition coming out some time in the 1940s. THAT version was reprinted by Dover in the 1980s. However, I hardly need editor Florence Brobeck telling ME to cut back on butter. Plus that edition leaves out crucial recipes such as instructions to heal a “drooping canary” and “how to clean polished Mahogany”. Mrs. Howard was a regular Heloise. 

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1913 Edition of Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen

Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen is sure to make regular appearances on this website. Call me up if you need help with a drooping canary.

Recipe:

  • 1 young rabbit
  • 1 onion cut in two slices
  • 2 cloves
  • a little mace
  • parsley
  • .25 Lb streaked bacon, cut into dice
  • water
  • 20 button onions
  • 2 oz butter
  • 1 Tablespoon flour

Cut a young rabbit into neat joints and lay it in lukewarm water to draw put the blood then drain it and put it into a stew pan with a large onion cut into slices two cloves a little mace parsley and a quarter of a pound of streaked bacon cut into dice. Cover all with water and let it simmer twenty minutes keeping it well skimmed. Then pass the stock through a sieve into a dish and take out the pieces of rabbit and bacon. In another stew pan have ready two ounces of butter mixed with a good table spoonful of flour moisten with the stock and stir over the fire until boiling. Then trim the rabbit nicely and put it with the bacon and twenty button onions into the sauce and let it simmer until the onions are tender. Skim off all the fat. Then pour in a gill of cream into which the yolks of two eggs have been mixed. Leave it on the fire until it thickens but do not let it boil Take out the rabbit arrange it nicely on a dish pour the sauce over it and serve

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This step may have been unnecessary with my thawed rabbit of unknown age.

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Fun fact: briefly soaking garlic or small onions like these makes quick work of removing their skins

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When in doubt use a thermometer to keep from scrambling those eggs

Hassle aside, this was a tasty dinner. Went great with some not-period-appropriate garlic naan.

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Source: Eat, Drink & Be Merry in Maryland

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I could dedicate this entire blog to cooking from this book and researching the people in it. At times I may be appear to be doing so.

‘Frederick Philip Stieff, son of the piano-making Baltimore family, was a celebrated amateur chef and a sort of menu historian. He made a personal crusade of collecting—mainly using hand-written family papers and the memories of aged cooks—old Maryland recipes. This volume, he declares in his foreword, offers merely “a generalization, a diversification of the receipts [as he calls them] which have for decades contributed to the gastronomic supremacy of Maryland.”’ – JHU Press

I actually can’t find as much information as I’d like about Stieff, other than his lineage, the fact that he is buried in Greenmount (a visit is in order), and that he has written at least one possibly not food-related book.

Upon his death in 1964 he donated rare books covering “a wide range of cookery including recipe books, the provisioning of households, the history of beer, wine, and other beverages as well as histories of inns and taverns” to the Pratt Library.

Eat, Drink & Be Merry in Maryland seems to be inspired by the same goals as my own interest in Maryland food. Yes there are crabcakes, but there are also biscuits, puddings, fried chicken, bear steaks from Western Maryland, stuffed hams and more hams, and a cursory archival of historic menus.

There are also celebrations of Maryland’s many historic homes, hunt clubs, railroad dining service, and hotel restaurants.

It must be noted, as the forward in my Hopkins Press 1997 edition states:  ‘while the book’s tie to the past is its strong point, that link also contributes to its weakness. The patrician tone, found both in Stieff’s writing and in the illustrations by Edwin Tunis, can be jarring. Ladies are lovely examples of “vivacious femininity.” Servants, housewives, and farmers are characterized as not too bright and are the object of many jokes. In reissuing this sixty-five-year-old-work, the Johns Hopkins Press eliminated the illustrations it considered racist. The past is not always pretty.’

The book primarily deals with the receipts of Marylanders of notable lineage, or those residing in large estates. I’m often left wondering about the enslaved people and servants behind this cooking.

Nonetheless, the book is like a gateway into Maryland culinary history, a model for enthusiasm and self-celebration, and an all-around fascinating read.

Invoice, Chas M Stieff Manufacturer of Grand & Upright Pianos

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