Warning: This is a pretty macabre story to go with a candy recipe post. It’s October, so if you want you could come up with some intrigue about ghosts in Greenmount Cemetery. If you are more the spiritual type you can think of the connections between food and communion with the dead.
A recent run-in with a bad head-cold scared me back into eating massive quantities of citrus fruit. After carefully removing the flesh and juice from a half-dozen grapefruits I figured I would finally try a common old recipe: candied citrus peel. Lemon and orange had been popular options in all of my oldest cookbooks but in the early 20th-century grapefruit really began to catch on.
Baltimore at that time had more diverse produce options than you would expect. While citrus fruit from Florida was a huge industry, the ports at the Inner Harbor were just as likely to receive shipments from Jamaica along with other items like coconuts and bananas. Occasionally fruit was even smuggled in. Many failed fruit smuggling efforts were reported in the pages of the Baltimore Sun from the late 1800s through 1910s.
In September of 1909 the Baltimore Sun reported that “Grape fruit is more popular each season, and is no longer considered a luxury, as formerly.”
For the most part, as you would expect, grapefruit was eaten for breakfast, juiced, or served more pretentiously scooped out and combined with other fruits back in their halved rind. If using both the fruit and the peel was not sufficient, the women’s page of the Sun had the following DIY hint in 1913: “the seeds of grapefruit have an æsthetic use which the lowly apple core has not, for if planted they will grow into a beautiful green vine.”
By 1931 the local grocery store Hopper & McGaw listed grapefruit as a “Thanksgiving specialty,” along with raisins, mince meat, figs and nuts.
“The Tried and True Recipe Book” at the Enoch Pratt Free Library
The cookbook I got my candied peel recipe from is not dated, but the call number at the Pratt Library implies it is from 1920. Entitled “The Tried and True Recipe Book,” it was compiled by the Woman’s Guild of the Church of St. Michael and All Angels in Baltimore. Lots of the surnames ring familiar to me from street names, Maryland families, and other recipes in my collection: Mosher, Sothoron, Diffenderffer, etc.
This recipe (as well as many others in the book ranging from soups to sweets) was contributed by Mrs. J. J. Forbes Shaw, the wife of a Baltimore banker and tobacco merchant. Born Harriet Alexander Hereford in Union WV in 1874, she hailed from well-known families. Her father, Frank Hereford was a senator and congressman. Her grandfather on her mother’s side, Hugh Elmwood Caperton, was also a congressman. The maternal side of her family are ancestors of William Gaston Caperton III, the governor of West Virginia from 1989-1997.
Harriet married James John Forbes Shaw in 1907, and the family lived at 1809 N. Calvert Street. They were fairly prominent, turning up in society columns in the Sun. In 1921, however, their mentions took a turn for the tragic.
Rev. Wyatt Brown, D. D., “The Tried and True Recipe Book”
Their 12-year old daughter Alice Caperton Shaw drowned when a rowboat containing the girl, her two sisters and three other children capsized on the Servern River. Reverend Wyatt Brown, whose photo appears in the front of “The Tried and True Recipe Book,” rescued the other five children. The many newspapers that covered the incident reported that he was a nervous wreck after the incident, covered in scratches from the children’s grasps.
Twelve years after the harrowing incident, in April 1933, Harriet Shaw died at age 59. Mr. Shaw did not recover from the pain of these deaths. On September 20th, 1937, he visited the graves of his wife and daughter at Greenmount Cemetery. Eventually, he kneeled on the ground, pulled out a pistol and shot himself in the head. The cemetery superintendent who had been watching Shaw pace in the cemetery cried out, but it was too late. Shaw left a note pinned to his clothing, stating simply “The act is my own.”
The Shaw home on 1809 N. Calvert Street is no longer standing, but nearby, The Church of St. Michael & All Angels is still there at 2013 St. Paul. The reverend who saved the surviving daughters from the 1921 boat accident is most likely Hunter Wyatt-Brown. He was known for weaving the “Lost Cause” ideology into his sermons, and Mrs. Shaw had been a member of Daughters of the Confederacy. Today, The Church of St. Michael & All Angels serves a multicultural congregation.
Although Wyatt-Brown left Maryland to become a bishop in Harrisburg Pennsylvania, his son Bertram Wyatt-Brown returned to Baltimore to study history at Johns Hopkins. In “The Society for U.S. Intellectual History” in 2015, Andrew Hartman wrote of Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s work: “Bert… zeroed in on the tragic and gothic South, as well as a host of men and women, gnarled by death, humiliation, loss, and anxieties. His books are populated by the chronically depressed, and by tortured writers on the brink of suicide, or novelists who were as much at war with the self as the region they called home.”
Recipe:
- Grapefruit peel, cut into thin slices
- salt
- water
- sugar
“After taking out the meat of the grape fruit cut rind in long pieces. Cover it with a strong salt water and let it soak 12 hours. Change water every 12 hours until rinds have soaked in strong brine 48 hours. Take rinds out of salt water and cover with fresh cold water and let it boil 10 minutes. Change water and let it boil another 10 minutes. Do this 6 times. Then take it out and weigh rinds and put a pound of sugar to every pound of fruit. Let cook slowly until the syrup, formed by putting sugar on rinds, has boiled away. Then take out piece by piece of grape fruit and roll in granulated sugar.“
Recipe from “The Tried and True Recipe Book,” Woman’s Guild, Church of St. Michael and All Angels, Baltimore
candied citrus peel chopped as a jelly roll cake filling