Rose Geranium Jelly, Miss Fanny’s Receipt Book

After falling in love with Rose Geranium Cake, I felt I had to try the other rose geranium recipe in my database. This jelly uses the pectin from apples and gets a light flavor from the geranium leaf. The small green apples I picked from a neighborhood tree worked great for this.

This recipe comes from the “Maryland’s Way: The Hammond-Harwood House Cookbook,” where it is one of many recipes attributed to “Miss Fanny.” For years I’ve been wondering about this – who was she? Who better to ask than a food historian who also happens to be vice president of the board of trustees of Hammond-Harwood House: Joyce White.

Joyce has been working on a project called the Great Maryland Recipe Hunt, aimed at preserving our modern culinary heritage. I figured I would also ask about how that has been going.

Do you happen to know the identity of the “Miss Fanny” of “Miss Fanny’s Receipt Book” that appears throughout Maryland’s Way?

I believe (but have not been able to confirm) that she might actually be Frances Loockerman who lived in Hammond-Harwood House from 1811 to the 1850s. Before she was married she was known as Fanny Chase, so recipes in which the “Miss Fanny” title is mentioned in Miss Ann Chase’s account book and in the Harwood papers points in this direction. She was Judge Jeremiah Townley Chase’s daughter and married Richard Loockerman. Judge Chase bought Hammond-Harwood House for them and remained the owner because he was afraid Richard might gamble the house away and leave his daughter homeless.

How has Maryland’s Way impacted your own research or understanding of Maryland food and its history?

The recipes and ingredients in MW are a microcosm of Maryland’s early foundational cuisine. When studied closely, they represent the incredible diversity of ingredients but also the ingenuity employed by cooks, many of whom were enslaved during the antebellum years, to render the recipes which were often vague and incomplete, into elegant meals to impress Maryland’s gentry. 

Could you tell us about the anniversary of Maryland’s Way and what the new book aims to do?

The working title for the forthcoming companion book to MW is called Cooking Maryland’s Way: Voices of a Diverse Cuisine. 2023 marks the 60th anniversary of the initial publication of MW, and this book is being presented as a way to highlight the diversity in that 1963 book. Thie companion book is using selected recipes from the 1963 book to give voice to three key ethnic influences on Maryland’s early cuisine (from European settlement to the Civil War); in other words, this is a lens focused on the ways in which the British culinary base was influenced by Native American, African American and German traditions. A dive into assorted local native ingredients and how local indigenous people used them will be included. Accounts of how Maryland’s early African Americans, both enslaved and free, influenced the development of Maryland’s overall cuisine will also be included. The new book will look at how MW reflects the early Afro-Maryland diet and will also be a platform to give voice to the many known enslaved or free cooks who worked in kitchens across Maryland during the pre-War years.

The recipe hunt – how has that been going so far? Any especially interesting stories? 

A separate, but equally important, project inspired by the 60th anniversary of the MW cookbook is the Great Maryland Recipe Hunt. The goal of the Hunt is to give Marylanders today an opportunity to share their recipes and food traditions for the benefit of future generations of researchers. The Hunt started on September 1, 2022 and ends August 31, 2023. There has been a slow trickle of submissions; however, many of the submissions have been very informative and show both the ways in which Marylanders have preserved past food traditions but are also adding new dimensions of diversity to the cuisine. Submissions of interest include more traditional fare from  local indigenous tribes, such as the Nanticoke and Piscataway, and numerous crab dishes to foods that reflect more recent immigration into Maryland from places such as Venezuela and China. A few manuscript receipt journal books from the 19th and early 20th centuries have also been great finds. 

All of these recipes are going into the state archives like a time capsule – what do you hope future generations might understand from them? Have you imagined yourself a researcher coming across such a treasure trove?

This collection will be housed at the Maryland State Archives and will include not only the submissions received during the year of the Hunt but also the results of my own research. It will be a huge collection of Maryland’s food history, spanning generations and traditions. I really hope it helps future researchers understand the complexity of Maryland’s foodways over the course of centuries, including the early 21st century. We take our food traditions for granted, but future researchers will need a bit of guidance. Hopefully, this collection will give them tools for understanding our food traditions, but also inspire them to keep digging for more. 

Can you talk about the old recipe books that have been donated?

There have been two manuscripts donated and one that I found recently off Ebay and am donating.

1: The 1840s manuscript journal by Margaret Sellman Brogden of Southern Anne Arundel County donated by her descendants. This books has about 60 pages of handwritten recipes. Note: they are also donating a later manuscript book from the early 20th century.

2: The 1940s manuscript journal book by Julia Smith Norvell of Baltimore donated by her daughter, Kathleen Norvell. This book has a strong German flavor to it. 

3: A c.1910-1920s Mergenthaler journal book from Baltimore that contains numerous recipes pasted into it from Baltimore newspapers. Many of the recipes reflect rationing during WWI. A note paper with the heading of Fritz Mergenthaler, 5005 Liberty Heights Ave., Baltimore, Maryland is found inside. 

Anything else we should know about the “Maryland’s Way” companion and when it can be expected?

We are on track for the companion book to be released in the latter half of 2024. Details will be available as soon as there is more information.

You can submit your recipes and stories to the Great Maryland Recipe Hunt at their website https://marylandrecipes.org/.

Recipe:

“Wash apples (not too ripe), cut in pieces without paring or coring. Barely cover with water and boil until very soft. Pour all into a bag of coarse material, such as a sugar bag, hand it over a container and allow to drip overnight. Do not squeeze or apple juice will be cloudy. To 2 cups juice add 2 cups sugar and the juice of 1/2 lemon. Boil until syrup will jell. Place a rose geranium leaf in the bottom of each jelly glass. Pour in hot jelly and cover with paraffin. Store in a cool place.”

Scroll to top
error: Content is protected !!