Maryland Chowder, Duchess of Windsor

It’s pretty rare that I should have *too much information* about a person associated with a recipe. For years now I’ve sighed in frustration when all I can find on someone is a date of birth, a passing newspaper mention, a headstone.

This week’s recipe comes from a woman who has been so scrutinized and written about that there is practically no point in summarizing her life story.

Wallis Simpson, The Duchess of Windsor, remains a fascinating figure to many. Any time members of the British royal family come up in the news, many Baltimoreans like to reflect on our city’s brush with royalty.

Born Bessie Wallis Warfield in 1896, Simpson was still technically married to her second husband (who’d left his first wife to marry Wallis) when she began her relationship with Edward VIII (full name: Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David), heir to the throne.

Around the time that they met, Edward had been seeing a married woman named Viscountess Furness. According to “Wallis and Edward: letters 1931-1937”, Furness then had an affair with Prince Aly Khan, described in the book as “a rake.” The affair ended Edward and Furness and made way for Edward and Simpson.

Edward ascended to the throne in January of 1936 but abdicated to be with Wallis Simpson, stepping down from being “King Edward VIII” to the woefully lowly title of “Duke of Windsor” in the process. This was a British constitutional crisis at a time when England was about to get involved in a war that would decimate the country. So there’s that, also.

Oh yeah, and apparently Wallis & Edward hung out with the Nazis in 1937 and the FBI had a possible Nazi sympathizer file on Simpson. The FBI was probably just overlooking the fact that most rich people just don’t care about anything. For his part the Duke said something about counting on the Nazis to smash communism.

The Duchess of Windsor, Cecil Beaton (flickr)

The whole Nazi business put Edward in even worse standing with the Crown than the whole marrying a divorcee thing, so they gave Edward some grunt work: being Governor of the Bahamas. We’ve all been there. This is why we need labor unions, people!!!

The married life of the Duke and Duchess was relatively drama free compared to all of that, so I might as well leave it there. Edward died in 1972 and Wallis in 1986. There are still about a million other rumors and theories around this whole saga. Too many to mention.

So anyway, in 1941, it was announced that the Duchess of Windsor would write a cookbook, with an introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt, to benefit the British War Relief Society.

By some accounts, the Duchess was a known hostess in the Baltimore society tradition. According to a friend of Simpson:

“Wallis’s parties have so much pep no one ever wants to leave. Cocktails with sausages, not on skewers, caviar with vodka, soup with sherry, fish with white wine, hock, champagne, from then on to the brandy. Needless to say, I do not attempt this lavish mixture. But her food is as elaborate as her wine list.”

When the cookbook came out in 1942, Hutzler’s ran ads in the Baltimore Sun: “A new book by a Baltimorean… delicious cookery recipes from a famous hostess.” The Sun also announced when the book was available at the Pratt Library.

The Baltimore Sun advertising a sewing pattern, 1960

Whether or not the Duchess compiled the recipes herself remains questionable. The book contains recipes for Maryland Beaten Biscuits, Maryland Fried Chicken, Lamb Dijonnaise (I had no idea that was a real word!), oyster pie, shad roe, and many other familiar favorites. The most interesting recipe by far is for Pork Cake – a cake made with salt pork plus currants, raisins, cinnamon and spices. The recipe strikes modern readers as strange, but it is in fact completely in line with the British lineage of Southern food, bringing things full circle.

I didn’t make pork cake. I made “Maryland Chowder,” a crab chowder delicately seasoned with celery salt (aka the main ingredient in Old Bay.) I hand-picked a dozen crabs for the full-crab flavor. It was pretty good because… crab. Nothin’ worth abdicating the throne about.

Recipe:

• 2 cups crabmeat
• 2 tablespoons fat
• 2 tablespoons chopped onion
• 2 cups diced potato
• 2 cups boiling water
• 2 cups hot milk
• 1 tablespoon flour
• 1 tablespoon butter
• Paprika
• Celery salt
• 1 ½ teaspoons salt (or to taste)
• Pepper

Melt fat*, sauté onion until faintly browned and add potato and water. Cook until potatoes are tender. Add crabmeat and milk. Blend flour and butter and add to the soup. Stir well and simmer 3 to 5 minutes. Season to taste. Approximate yield: 6 portions.

*I used butter and its a little unsightly in the photos. Maybe some pork fat would be good.

Recipe from “Some Favorite Southern Recipes of The Duchess of Windsor”