Sources: Community Cookbooks

Community cookbooks are a mixed blessing for me.
On one hand they’re such a fantastic window into the kitchens of the more middle-class citizens as opposed to the fabulous lifestyles of “Eat, Drink & Be Merry in Maryland” or “Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen.”

Flipping through the pages you can see changing trends, adventurous cooking and old family recipes, and pride and love expressed in (mostly) housewives feeding their family and friends.

The Park School Cook Book (1964), Art Work Miss Grace Van Order

Loyola Recipes(1974), sketches by Eileen F. Bolgiano

On the other hand there are HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of these books, churches and schools making slight updates, revising year after year and it’s a bit hard to keep up with or to fit into bookshelf and budget.

According to “Food & Wine”:

The first community cookbook was published during the Civil War. Yankee women determined to raise money for field hospitals organized themselves into what they called “Sanitation Commissions” and devised a way to make their domestic skills marketable: At a fair held in Philadelphia in 1864, they offered their own recipes under the title A Poetical Cook-Book…

After the war, women’s clubs organized cookbook projects to benefit widows, veterans and orphans. By 1915, as many as 6,000 community cookbooks had been published in the United States, and women were raising money to fund kindergartens and promote temperance and other political causes.

Magician in the Kitchen(1980), Federated Garden Clubs of Maryland. drawing: Mrs. David MacTaggart, Jr., Gibson Island

One of the oldest Maryland community cookbooks available on Google Books is “Tested Maryland Recipes,” compiled and published by the Ladies of the Presbyterian Church, Chesapeake City Maryland, that book contains assorted classics of Maryland cooking such as white potato pie as well as household advice such as tips “to keep ice.”

Tested Maryland Recipes

Queen Anne Goes to the Kitchen is perhaps one of the more famous of Maryland Community Cookbooks. It was first published in 1962 by The Episcopal Church Women of St. Paul’s Parish in Queen Anne’s County. That book bears many Maryland ancestral names and an assortment of contemporary and family recipes as well as some nice illustrations.

Queen Anne Goes to the Kitchen, Artwork: Stephanie Thompson, Sally Clark, Hallie Rugg

However, it takes an assortment of these types of cookbooks to compile a reasonable cross-section of Maryland food. In some school cookbooks we might find a more diverse array of names suggesting the ongoing immigrant contribution to Maryland menus.

Magician in the Kitchen(1980), Federated Garden Clubs of Maryland, Recipe Sketch Mrs. William G. Hill, Jr., Garden Club of Frederick

For the time being, I try to draw the line at buying books published after 1990. It’s a pretty arbitrary rule although it is likely that the proliferation of food blogs, cooking websites, and the internet recipe commentariat have chipped away at the vitality of a community cookbook in a typical household in that span of time. Meanwhile, thousands of community cookbooks continue to float around indefinitely, finding their way into the hands of historians and fanatics.