Definition of olio
2a: a miscellaneous mixture : HODGEPODGE
— Merriam-Webster
It didn’t take too many years of research for me to come to the disappointing realization that a lot of the romantic notions I’d held about recipes were simply not true. “Recipes” are not exact formulas. They can never really live up to the promise of conjuring up an exact place or time. Authenticity is a nebulous and possibly meaningless concept. Few recipes are truly as regional as we’d like to believe. Even fewer recipes were “invented” by any one cook or chef in some inspired moment.
Take the iconic crab cake: the ultimate ‘Maryland’ food. When I search for crab cakes in pre-1900s newspapers I find menu listings and recipes from Pennsylvania, California, New York, Texas, Kentucky… and more.
Other favorite recipes originated as corporate promotions, taking on a life of their own in the hands of home cooks until their unexciting origins become obscured.
I’ve come to accept all of this and I’ve largely dispensed with hierarchies of recipe value and validity.
Having said all that, how do I feel when I find a unique recipe, so unmistakably Maryland, created by a cook and spread organically by word of mouth? Pretty intrigued.
Lloyd-Tilghman Family Cookbook, University of Maryland Special Collections
I recently entered the recipes from the Lloyd-Tilghman Family Cookbooks into my database. Housed at the University of Maryland’s digital special collections, the recipe books and scrap collections were most likely compiled by Mary Lloyd. Among the collection are recipes from Lloyd’s wide social network as well as many recipes copied from popular cookbooks of the times, including Mrs. B.C. Howard’s “Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen” (1873), “The Carolina Housewife” (1843) by Sarah Rutledge, and the wildly popular British cookbook “Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management,” first published in 1861 in England.
Mary Lloyd and her husband Edward Lloyd VII resided at the Wye House on the Eastern Shore. Frederick Douglass was enslaved there by the Lloyd family. He wrote of the brutal conditions in his autobiography. Douglass’ description of hunger and the temptation to fight “Old Nep” – the family dog – for scraps of food inspired the title of Michael Twitty’s groundbreaking first book “Fighting Old Nep: The Foodways of Enslaved Afro-Marylanders 1634-1864.”
Wye House, Maryland Historical Trust
The Lloyd-Tilghman Family Cookbooks contain a lot of household hints (e.g. “To Clean Polished Mahogany”) as well as an inordinate amount of recipes for Tea Punch (six recipes!); pickling formulas for onions, peaches, walnuts, etc.; cakes; ginger breads; and plenty of seafood like shad, crabs, oysters and rockfish.
As I entered a recipe for “Crab Olio”, with “most excellent” written below it, my memory was stirred. I’d seen this recipe before. I looked through my database and determined:
- The recipe first appeared in “Queen of the Kitchen” by M. L. Tyson. (Mary Lloyd Tyson)
- Mrs. B.C. Howard copied the recipe into “Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen” (and changed the wording slightly)
- Mary Lloyd copied the original Queen of the Kitchen Recipe into her personal recipe book
- Susan Carroll Poultney copied Mrs. B. C. Howard’s version into her person recipe book (found at the Maryland Historical Society)
Of course, there is always the intriguing possibility that Mary Lloyd’s recipe is the original, and Mrs. Tyson got the recipe from her. Who knows…
When I did further research on Crab Olio I found that Mrs. Howard’s version was reprinted in 1883 in the “Our Mountain Home” newspaper in Talladega Alabama as “Maryland Crab Olio,” and appeared again in 1884 “Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cookbook”, where it was labeled “A Southern Recipe.” That version was copied into other cookbooks.
Queen of the Kitchen, M. L. Tyson, 1870
This all means that “Crab Olio” may just be one of the most Maryland recipes I’ve seen. So what is it? Well, it’s basically just chopped up eggplant and tomatoes mixed with crabmeat and beaten eggs, sauteed, then topped with breadcrumbs and baked. Based on the parties involved in propagating this recip[e, it was likely developed by an enslaved cook with ingredients on hand. As for the “Olio” term, it sometimes is used for salads of turkey or cold meats, but nothing resembling Crab Olio.
For anyone interested in paying homage by making this most Maryland of recipes, I recommend a few things: Leach the bitterness from the eggplant. If you can afford real Maryland crab, use it, especially if you can pick whole ones. The good news for Old Bay fans is that you could season this recipe highly with Old Bay without sacrificing authenticity. Old Bay is a derivative of the “Kitchen Pepper” that would have been used to season this in the 19th century. After mixing and frying the ingredients, brown it in a very hot oven as briefly as possible.
Eggplant being a pretty divisive vegetable, I can’t really recommend this recipe as a good use of crabmeat (I used canned). I’m happy for Mary Lloyd that she found it “most excellent” but I wasn’t as convinced. I won’t be copying it into my own recipe scrapbook anytime soon.
Like Cherry Douci, this recipe something of an interesting antique; shared among upper-class ladies in the 1880s, only to die out before the turn of the century.
Recipe:
“Boil a large egg plant. Scald half a dozen late tomatoes & skin them. (use more if they are small) drain them on a sifter till the water is all out of them. When the egg plant is cold, chop it & the tomatoes and three or four hard boiled eggs together. Bear three eggs and mix with the other ingredients also pepper and salt. First fry it in a skillet with a piece of butter. Then brown it in the dish in which it is to be sent to the table with crumbs of bread & bits of butter on the top.”
