OLD LINE PLATE - Page 4 of 67 - COOKING / MARYLAND / HISTORY

Ginger Pound Cakes, McCormick Manual of Cookery c. 1912

December 21, 2023December 22, 2023

“Some one has said that every big man has a hobby,” according to an article in the Baltimore Sun in 1915. “Willoughby M. McCormick is no exception to the rule… He has two hobbies that go together. One is food quality in connection with food purity, and the other is domestic science, or the science of cookery. Under his direction [McCormick Spice Company] has published a splendid manual of Cookery.”

McCormick’s Manual of Cookery was first published in the early 1910s. By 1914, it was retitled “Bee Brand Manual of Cookery: The Blue Book of The Culinary Art.”

The 1915 article in the Baltimore Sun boasted that the manual was “full of recipes from the best cooks of Maryland and the Virginias, in which dishes are preserved from the Colonial period—dishes which gave the South the gastronomic championship of the world.” Once again, “Colonial” was used as a euphemism for antebellum times. Even the McCormick cookery book capitalized on a romanticized vision of Southern hospitality.

*McCormick sponsored window at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, 1946. Digital Maryland*

McCormick shared some interesting opinions in the article. He didn’t think the Pure Foods law went far enough. His brand, he said, used more vanilla than legally required in their extract. He liked for consumers to visit his plant downtown to get firsthand confidence in his products. “Each consumer is our personal customer,” he said. He felt that “purity and quality and preparation of food are at the bottom of the misery or happiness of a nation of people.”

McCormick believed that men should teach their daughters about finance. “They do that nicely, over in France,” he said. “In this country women spend money as if it were nothing.” As an example, he mentioned women who bought artificial vanilla extract “from old women and cripples who peddle from door to door.” The Sun entitled this section of the article “Spending Money Foolishly.”

The article’s writer visited that McCormick plant and was enchanted. “A journey through the McCormick house would pay anyone who desired swift transportation from the humdrum modern business life to the atmosphere of the Far East, with its romance and fragrances,” they wrote, describing the plant as “the Kingdom of the Sounds of Odors, where very delight wafted to the nostrils is a song or a poem.”

Milk Punch, Cookery Notebook of George Dobbin Brown

December 10, 2023December 10, 2023

The twenty-five recipes for Milk Punch in my database all contain similar ingredients: milk, rum or brandy, nutmeg, sugar.

For years now I’ve been intending to make one of these recipes for eggnog’s cousin (or rival, depending on who you ask).

It was only this year that I noticed that these punch recipes, with their similar ingredients, fall into two different camps, with wildly different results.

The recipe I chose is one of several that involve the addition of citrus juice and peel. The milk curdles and is strained off, leaving a clarified product. The result is not so much eggnog’s cousin as a distant DNA relative.

I just couldn’t resist the appeal of a process to turn a cloudy mixture of milk, lemons, and liquor into a clear beverage with a long shelf life.

Clarified Milk Punch dates to the 17th century, and appears in some of Maryland’s oldest cookbooks. The two recipes in Mrs. B.C. Howard’s 1873 cookbook “Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen” are both entitled “India Milk Punch.” Both end not by boasting about the flavor, but the fact that the punch “will keep for a year or more.”

*Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen, 1873*

A book of recipes donated by Dr. George Dobbin Brown to the Maryland Center of History and Culture dates to around the same time. It’s Milk Punch recipe is very similar, with the addition of nutmeg. This is the recipe that I followed.

Stuffed Cabbage With Parsley Cream Sauce, Mrs. Edwin Obrecht

December 2, 2023December 2, 2023

Cabbage stuffed with meat is a classic combination, with variations all around the world. There’s Polish Gołąbki, cabbage rolls filled with meat and topped in tomato sauce. A Chinese version is stuffed with pork and mushrooms.

Early American versions involve stuffing the meat inside the cabbage, as The Townsends and Chef Walter Staib have both demonstrated on their shows.

I’ve made at least one other version of stuffed cabbage myself, and it is delicious— if unnecessarily finicky.

The recipe may have been a little old-fashioned by 1953, but Mrs. Edwin Obrecht contributed hers to “Random Ruxton Recipes,” compiled by the Church of the Good Shepherd. The church boasted a well-to-do congregation, and almost all of the recipe contributors I’ve researched were prominent in Baltimore newspapers. The original is fairly rare. I accessed it at the Enoch Pratt Free Library. Another version of the cookbook was printed in 1977.

Mrs. Obrecht was born Doris Laura Merle in 1919. Her grandparents were German. Her father, Andrew Merle, was the president of a distillery firm. According to Merle’s 1965 obituary, he “spent the Prohibition years as a broker of medicinal spirits” and then launched his firm, Standard Distillers Products, Inc., when Prohibition was repealed.

Kapusta And Kilbash (and Sauerkraut for Thanksgiving)

November 21, 2023November 21, 2023

A different version of this essay appears in Festive Maryland Recipes: Holiday Traditions from the Old Line State.

Sauerkraut came to Baltimore with German (and later, Eastern European) immigrants, but it made the leap to the dinner tables of Baltimore’s other citizens, in particular alongside the Thanksgiving turkey.

Much has been written about this peculiar phenomenon, with a new flurry of articles and social media posts coming out each year.

In an Instagram post made by the catering company H3irloom Food Group, Chef Tonya Thomas posed proudly with a plate. “Thank you to all of our customers who ordered Chef Tonya’s sauerkraut to add to their holiday spread,” read the caption.

“No matter who you are and what your race, in Baltimore, sauerkraut is on the table at holidays,” Thomas told me. She can trace the sauerkraut tradition in her family back for generations, to well before the 20th century. When Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, Germans were the largest group of immigrants in Baltimore, she noted.

In many places where sauerkraut is eaten, it is stewed with meat cuts or sausages for extra flavor. This was a good fit for Black home cooks’ practice of using every part of an animal, and Tonya’s grandmother cooked hers with pigtails. Tonya eventually began to flavor her own sauerkraut with smoked turkey instead of pork. More recently, she has flavored the sauerkraut with vegetable stock and spices instead of meat, to accommodate H3irloom’s vegan guests.

*Sauerkraut spread in Festive Maryland Recipes*

The formula for sauerkraut itself is so simple that only a handful of recipes appear in my Maryland cookbook collection. It’s also long been available for sale in prepared form.

In Elizabeth Ellicott Lea’s 1845 cookbook “Domestic Cookery,” the two recipes for sauerkraut are labeled as “cabbage,” suggesting that sauerkraut may have been the primary use for cabbage in her household.

The earliest Maryland recipe calling the dish by name is in the 1870 “Queen of the Kitchen,” by Mary Lloyd Tyson. Had Tyson wanted to, she could have purchased prepared sauerkraut at William Bodmann’s Pickling House and Vinegar Depot on Howard Street.

Ritz Dessert, Maude Schell

November 7, 2023November 7, 2023

New blog posts have been rolling in very slowly since I’ve been busy promoting “Festive Maryland Recipes.” Sometimes I get nervous about letting my research fall by the wayside.

But I’ve been tending to an aspect of Old Line Plate that has become every bit as important to me: connecting with people.

The pandemic made me realize how much this blog experience has changed me as a person. I am, yes, much more cheesy than I used to be, but also less insecure, and less drawn to the negative. My knowledge of how lucky I am to have this has helped me to hold it together when life gets confusing.

What I’d never have guessed is the myriad ways that Old Line Plate has helped me cross paths with kindness. I receive emails from people who find their family recipes on my website. But I’ve also met friendly eBay sellers, librarians, cookbook collectors, generous church groups, and other bloggers and writers.

Having to swallow my shyness and encourage bookstores to carry “Festive Maryland Recipes” was not the easiest thing for me to do. I didn’t know that the process would actually put me in touch with even more nice people.

Some of my favorite stories in “Festive Maryland Recipes” are from Western Maryland. I’ve been eager to spread the word on Frostburg’s Cornish Saffron Bread for years. It so happens that that very town has a long-standing independent bookstore. I reached out to Fred Powell from Main Street Books and he kindly supported us by stocking the book.

Fred established Main Street Books in 1989. He was new to the bookselling business and was simply trying to fill a need in Frostburg. He involved himself heavily in the local community by volunteering, sponsoring sports teams, and connecting with readers who would become his customers.

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