One of the many changes that the pandemic caused in me was a reversal of my austere policy on hard-copies of cookbooks. Where once I had been donating my more rare books and avoiding paying for anything I could view in a library, I suddenly had the urge to build up my home collection more and more. Donations and acquisitions have nearly doubled the amount of books I have on hand.
One of the books I purchased is one of the earliest books that I had access to digitally, a slim 1884 fund-raising cookbook from Baltimore called “The Favorite Receipt Book and Business Directory,” produced by the Ladies Aid Society of the Church of the Holy Comforter.
The book is disappointingly anonymous, but the advertisements, which the book promotes as a feature, are plentiful and interesting.
Ads are sometimes the most illuminating part of a cookbook like this. Some books have a lot of ads that demonstrate a whole neighborhood’s worth of local businesses, like a phone book. It can present a window into what kind of goods were available. Ads for grocers offer insight into where the church’s women might shop. Ads for appliances show what would be the cutting edge kitchen equipment.
In other cases, you can piece together some social ties, through the last names in the ads. Maybe the businesses were in families of a particular church parish, or business associates of a prominent woman’s husband.
Of course, in the case of “The Favorite Receipt Book,” the recipes have no names so the ads are the best clue who was involved with the book. That’s not much to go on.
The reverend of the Church of the Holy Comforter at the time the book was printed was F. S. Hipkins. He would later go on to work at the St. Matthews Episcopal Church in Oakland Maryland, which Mary Lloyd Tyson’s 1870 “Queen of the Kitchen” cookbook had raised money to build. Hipkins’ career ended in some type of legal battle that I cannot comprehend whatsoever. It was thanks to Mary Lloyd Tyson’s involvement in that dispute that I was able to identify her as Queen of the Kitchen‘s author in 2016.
Women were heavily involved in the funding of the Church of the Holy Comforter.
seen on Baltimore- Historic Places of Worship
According to the blog “Baltimore- Historic Places of Worship,” the church was financed in 1876 by “a wealthy woman wanted to build a church in memory of her parents.” She insisted that the church be a free church. A common cause of ladies aid societies was to pay church expenses so that would-be-parishioners did not have to pay “pew rent.”
The Church of the Holy Comforter was mentioned fairly frequently in Baltimore newspapers:
In 1881 the church purchased a $3000 organ. “Prominent young ladies” from the church put on a theater production in 1893. In 1894 the Governor of Maryland attended a fair and supper there. One mention stated that the Ladies Aid Society had served an “excellent dinner.”
Despite the reputation for good food, it is highly possible that “The Favorite Receipt Book’s” recipes are all copied from other sources. The etiquette advice at the beginning of the book is identical to the text in an 1874 cookbook by the Ladies Aid of Chicago, “The Home Cook Book,” and many of the recipes (but not all) are copied from that book. The recipe I made, for an orange sponge cake, isn’t from The Home Cook Book verbatim, but a recipe for “Orange Cake” from a Mrs. A. N. Arnold has a nearly identical formula.
I made this cake because I had oranges from Hungry Harvest to use up, and I had no idea that the oranges were blood oranges. Imagine my surprise. The resulting cake and icing turned an off blue-grey. I don’t think this was a good use of my oranges.
Syndicated newspaper information (I hesitate to call them columns – more like snippets) in the 1880s claimed that blood oranges were made by grafting orange trees with pomegranate trees. In 1894, the Bel Air Aegis & Intelligencer concluded “there is not the slightest foundation for this belief.”
In the 1890s, various articles appeared suggesting that consumers were being cheated by oranges which were dyed and sold as blood oranges. This was a time of well-founded suspicion about food purity, but in this case the claim makes no sense and isn’t even physically possible. Despite newspapers running rebuttals to the “fake blood oranges” rumors, the same story resurfaced in the 1910s. The Lewiston Daily Sun took the story to the most extreme lengths. While most newspapers ran a story that blood oranges were being faked by injecting dye with a hypodermic needle, (“Even Oranges Doped,” read the Santa Cruz Sentinal headline), the Maine newspaper lamented “what a miserable world this is,” and claimed that a needle had been left in an orange. The fruit buyer had to have the needle removed surgically “with great difficulty.” As if this imaginary scenario weren’t upsetting enough, they sarcastically speculated that the blood-orange fraudster could bill the buyer for the needle.
The Church of the Holy Comforter was eventually merged with another church and demolished in the 1920s. Ridiculous viral “news” stories have outlived it by a century so far.
Recipe:
- 2 Cup sugar
- .5 Cup water
- .5 Teaspoons baking soda
- 2 oranges, grated rind & juice
- 5eggs, separated
- a little salt
- 1 Teaspoon cream of tartar
- 2 Cup flour
“Two cups of sugar, yolks of five eggs, half a cup of water, half a teaspoonful of soda, the grated rind and juice of one orange, the whites of three eggs, a little salt, two cups of flour, one teaspoonful of cream tartar. Bake as for jelly cake, and take the whites of two eggs beaten to a stiff froth, with sugar as for frosting, juice and grated rind of one orange, spread between cakes.”
Recipe from “The Favorite Receipt Book and Business Directory,” Ladies Aid Society of the Church of the Holy Comforter, 1884
