The Wikipedia entry for “Chess pie” offers up several possible explanations for the name – the pie is named for a piece of furniture called a pie chest, or for the town of Chester, England. Some theories are just silly. “It’s jes’ pie.” Okay… whatever. The likely explanation is that “chess pie” evolved from recipes…
The Slow Foods Ark of Taste is a list of thousands of food products, collected with the intent of promoting and preserving them before they die out. The list includes heirloom fruits and vegetables, rare livestock breeds, and prepared specialty foods like cheeses. Items are nominated to the list using criteria factoring in uniqueness, sustainability,…
Although Maryland’s history of celebrated restaurants, hotels and caterers may have influenced the cuisine that we enjoy to this day, there are very few recipes that can be directly tied to the early chefs. Chefs tended to work more intuitively and from experience. Recipes – even the relatively vague ones found in 19th-century cookbooks, simply…
Definition of olio 2a: a miscellaneous mixture : HODGEPODGE — Merriam-Webster It didn’t take too many years of research for me to come to the disappointing realization that a lot of the romantic notions I’d held about recipes were simply not true. “Recipes” are not exact formulas. They can never really live up to the…
Eliza Leslie’s “Strawberry Ice” isn’t exactly a Maryland recipe. I made this dessert to partake in the Dundurn Recipe Challenge. Since I didn’t get to a dedicated blog recipe, here it is. Dundurn Castle is a historic site operating as a civic museum in Hamilton Ontario. The mansion was built in 1835, on the site…