It’s almost hard to believe that the Sun published “My Favorite Recipe” in the same decade as Virginia Roeder’s “Fun with Sea Food.”
As much as I respect Roeder and her recipes, Helen Henry’s 1960s “My Favorite Recipe” column in the Sunday Sun was a welcome departure from Maryland’s long-unchanging recipe oeuvre.
Educator and librarian Mary Carter Smith shared a recipe for a peanut-coated chicken from Sierra Leone.
Carol Zapata, whose husband was a surgeon from Peru, offered up a recipe for “Cebiche” made using rockfish from the Chesapeake.
There was plenty of room for crab cakes, stuffed ham, and Thanksgiving roast goose, but the overall variety of recipes was far more representative of the dishes made in Maryland homes – and the variety we take for granted today.
“The Baltimore Sun is trying to coax the Governor of Maryland to appoint a yankee festival… Why don’t our Governor move in the important matter of appointing a day for thanksgiving? Pumpkin pies are coming from all quarters, and no day set apart yet.” – The Baltimore Sun, 11/15/1837
The Baltimore Sun was in its infancy when the newspaper took up an obsessive crusade to bring Thanksgiving to Maryland. For several years prior, other Maryland newspapers had reported on states whose governors had proclaimed a November day of thanksgiving. New York, Connecticut and New Hampshire in 1825; Massachusetts in 1830; Maine, Ohio, and Michigan in 1837; Ohio in 1839. (In some states, the announcements were made annually or the actual dates changed year-to-year.)
The Sun began publication in May of 1837. When their own November thanksgiving announcements started rolling out, most of them were accompanied with pleas to Governor Thomas Veazey to appoint a Thanksgiving in Maryland.
The announcements almost always mentioned pumpkin pie. In 1838 the Sun printed the news that The Boston Times described Thanksgiving day as a joyous occasion with “cider, frolic and fried dough-nuts.” “Where were the pumpkin pies?” the Sun replied accusatorially. While other papers such as the Maryland Gazette waxed spiritual about gratitude and strife, “the prayer of thanksgiving as well as that of invocation,” the Sun, in Baltimore food-obsessed fashion, continued to focus on the pie.
In 1842 the Sun plea to Governor Francis Thomas made a more serious appeal for the holiday by mentioning what a joyous day it was, how it had been adopted even by governors who were not “Yankee men”, and how Maryland had so many causes to be thankful. They even lamented the years of reporting on the official Thanksgiving proclamations of “‘this, that and the other’ governor[s] of ‘this that and the other’ state[s]’” without Maryland having a thanksgiving of our own.
The choice to abandon the pumpkin-pie talk for the patriotic overtures was a wise one. On November 19th, 1842, Governor Thomas declared that the 14th of December would be a day of “thanksgiving, praise and prayer to the Almighty, because of the manifold blessings enjoyed by [Marylanders].” The Sun smugly printed the proclamation while mentioning that they “might take some small credit to [them]selves for a suggestive agency.”
The newspaper tactfully left pumpkin pie out of that announcement, but they later printed suggestions on how to observe the new holiday, sneaking the pie in behind piety:
“The custom in other States, where a day has been set apart of this kind, is in the forenoon to go to church, then dine on roast turkies, plumb puddings and pumpkin pies, in the afternoon innocently amuse themselves and close the evening with a grand ball.” – The Baltimore Sun, 11/29/1842
A correspondent from Ellicott’s Mills wrote on December 1st, 1843, the day after that year’s Thanksgiving that “it is said that pumpkin pie will make a Yankee’s mouth water. Be that as it may; but give me good fat turkey and pumpkin pie… that pie! O, that pumpkin pie! Who can properly express the deliciousness of that pumpkin pie?”
Suggested Thanksgiving Menu, Indiana, 1888
Tastes change. In 1907 the Baltimore Sun had done a turnabout on pumpkin pie, printing an editorial which declared it to be “a vile pretender” which was “tolerated, but not loved.” The author lamented that pumpkin pie was just a vehicle for spices and declared that “examined in the cold glare of actual fact, the pumpkin pie becomes obviously bogus and unspeakably contemptible.”
What on earth happened? Well, for starters there is the very Northern “Yankee” associations of pumpkin pie in a state whose loyalties had been torn apart in the Civil War. In a recent essay, historian David Shields pointed to the widespread availability of canned pumpkin which was itself shipped from the north. “Canned pumpkin pie filling from the North and its distribution through southern groceries set off the woe reflex in southerners,” wrote Shields. Pumpkin pie and its Southern counterpart the sweet potato pie became symbolic. The perceived replacement of the latter by the former aroused anxieties about fading traditions and culture.
1899 ad for a Thanksgiving sale
Both pies have lived on, although the argument for pumpkin pie as a spice delivery system has been given new life by the raging fad of using those spices in other products. Here again, the backlash is disproportionate. Most of the spices used in pumpkin pie have been present in sweet and savory dishes since time immemorial. A bite of ‘pumpkin spice’ beef a la mode wouldn’t make Mary Randolph furrow her brow one bit.
I confess to being a one-time pumpkin pie detractor, but this recipe actually changed my mind. This pie was creamy and excellent. There could be a few explanations for this. 1: I used butternut squashes from my CSA so maybe they’re superior, 2: I cooked them in a certain wildly-popular pressure-cooking kitchen appliance, 3: Maybe my pie preferences were an insecure affectation all along.
Enoch Pratt Free Library
I got the recipe from a book called “Grannie’s Goodies from Somerset County,” compiled in 1970 by the residents of the Alice B. Tawes nursing home in Crisfield. Alice B. Tawes was the mother of Governor J. Millard Tawes. According to the Baltimore Sun, “the story goes that the home’s director was tired of residents’ complaints about the food, so he asked them to submit a favorite recipe to be cooked and served at the home.”
I traced this particular recipe, almost word-for-word, back to “Buckeye Cookery,” a classic community cookbook compiled in the 1870s by the First Congregational Church in Ohio.
Abraham Lincoln made Thanksgiving a national holiday during the middle of the Civil War (1863). In addition to reflecting on our agricultural abundance, he suggested that citizens pray for “the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation.”
Despite these solemn origins, the traditions of festivities and sports on Thanksgiving date back equally as far – whether it was clothing sales, shooting contests, or the football games that the Baltimore Sun proclaimed in 1903 to be “passing away as a Thanksgiving pastime.” The “gridiron sport” remains as much a part of Thanksgiving as ever, 125 years later, as does the pumpkin pie. The “vile pretender” is here to stay.
Recipe:
“Stew the squash or pumpkin till very dry and press through a colander; to each pint should be added 1 tablespoon butter. Beat in while warm 1 cup brown sugar or molasses; a little salt, 1 tablespoon cinnamon, 1 teaspoon ginger and ½ teaspoon soda. A little allspice may be added but it darkens the pies. Roll a few crackers very fine and add a handful to the batter or thicken with 2 tablespoons flour or 1 of cornstarch. As the thickening property of pumpkin varies, some judgment must be used in adding milk.”
From The Buckeye Cookbook via “Grannie’s Goodies from Somerset County”
Adaptation:
2 Pints pumpkin or squash (about one of the squashes pictured)
2 Tablespoons butter
2 Cups brown sugar
1.5 tsp salt
2 Tablespoons cinnamon
2 Teaspoons ginger
1 Teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon allspice
4 Tb flour
¼ cup evaporated milk
Peel squash and cook until soft. Drain well. Mash and stir in butter, sugar, soda, and spices. Stir in milk. This mixture can be stored overnight (I did). Mix in flour and pour in pie shell just before baking. 425° for about 40 minutes or until pie is no longer “jiggly.” Serve with whipped cream.
Home Economics as a professional pursuit codified “women’s work” and amended school curricula, but it also opened doors for women professionally.
The name Virginia Roeder may ring a bell to longtime Baltimore recipe collectors. For 23 years she wrote for the “women’s pages” of the Baltimore Evening Sun, offering guidance on cooking and housekeeping. She penned three columns weekly, totaling around 3500 over the course of her career. The most enduring legacy of these columns is the “Fun with Food” and “Fun with Sea Food” cookbooks still serving many Baltimore kitchens today.
Richard Q. Yardley illustration, “Fun With Sea Food”,1960
In 1953, the Sun profiled Roeder, who was then hosting a Television show called “Nancy Troy’s Food Show.” (I am not sure why she assumed the “role” of Nancy Troy on the show.) The Sun reported that Roeder’s days began at 5:30 a.m., preparing breakfast for her husband and three children before heading to work at the William S. Baer School where she taught home economics to disabled children. After a day’s work she prepared dinner for her family and then “[sat] down with her husband to bring his company’s books up to date” for his wholesale distribution business.
In 1961 the Sun ran a highly illustrated tour of the Roeder’s home on Meadowwood Road, asking “how does an advisor to housewives manage her own home?” They described the decor in the “immaculate” home, complete with pool table, children’s playroom, “roomy pink kitchen,” and a corner desk in the master bedroom where Roeder typed her columns on Saturdays.
Basically, Roeder was Baltimore’s own Martha Stewart. (Roeder served on the board of a bank – she did not get involved in any insider trading, however.)
Born Virginia Voigt in Oklahoma, Roeder followed in her mother’s footsteps to pursue a career in education, earning a bachelor’s degree from the University of Science and Arts at Oklahoma (formerly Oklahoma College for Women). She soon ended up in Baltimore, where she made her mark on the school system, the food culture, and even in banking.
She’s been inducted to the Oklahoma College for Women hall of fame, where a biography of her achievements declares itself to be “simply a list of firsts.” In addition to earning a master’s and a doctoral degree at Johns Hopkins, Virginia Roeder became the “first female Deputy Superintendent Baltimore City Public Schools,” “first woman president Maryland Association of Secondary School Principals,” and “first woman board of directors Carrolton Bank.”
After retiring from education she continued to be a successful businesswoman in real estate and travel agencies.
Even while working towards all of these goals, Roeder maintained the refined image of an ideal mid-century “housewife.”
I got my copies of “Fun with Sea Food” from the Book Thing. The photo at the front shows a smiling Virginia Roeder. The author’s biography lists one accomplishment after another before declaring “Mrs. Roeder does all the cooking for her family.”
Two recipes for crab cakes are included, one of which has been marked “excellent” by my book’s previous owner. Other sections besides “The Delightful Crab” are adorably titled: “The Fascinating Fish,” “The Sophisticated Scallop,” “The Admirable Oyster.”
The recipe for Clam Fritters asks below the title, “Haven’t you ever made them?” I hadn’t so I took Virginia Roeder up on her challenge.
Recipe:
.5 Pint clams, minced
.75 Cups flour
.5 Tablespoons baking powder
1 teaspoon crab seasoning (adapted – Roeder used nutmeg and salt._
1 beaten egg
.5 Cups milk
2 Teaspoons grated onion
.5 Tablespoons melted butter
oil for frying
Sift dry ingredients together. Combine egg, milk, onion, butter and clams. Add to dry ingredients and stir until smooth. Drop batter by teaspoonfuls into hot oil, 350 degrees, and fry until golden brown on each side.
Recipe adapted from “Fun With Sea Food,” Virginia Roeder
“To say that [Baltimore] is an ugly city is to give an altogether false impression, for ugliness ordinarily is construed as a negative quality, the absence of beauty. The astounding, the incredible, the downright fabulous ugliness of Baltimore, on the other hand, is distinctively a positive quality. The amazed newcomer to the city is almost persuaded that she studied ugliness, practiced it long and toilsomely, made a philosophy of ugliness and raised it to a fine art, so that in the end it has become a work of genius more fascinating than spick-and-span tidiness could ever be.” – Gerald W. Johnson, Century Magazine, 1928
Gerald W. Johnson has a brief biography written before the first of his two recipe contributions to “Eat Drink and Be Merry in Maryland,” in which he is noted as a biographer of Andrew Jackson and John Randolph of Roanoke. Nearly 100 years later, Johnson is more remembered for his outspoken liberal (for the time) opinions than by these works.
Born in North Carolina in 1890, he moved to Baltimore in 1926 and remained here for the rest of his life, writing for the Evening Sun in addition to many national publications. Johnson reflected on national politics from a Southern perspective, but also on Maryland issues – upon his arrival, he wrote, he was surprised to see the Taney statue; “in a respectable city I should as soon expected to find a statue of Beelzebub.” Johnson spent many of his years in Maryland at a home on 1310 Bolton Street. He had more recently been living in Towson when he died in 1980.
From the vantage of this Union state just below the Mason-Dixon line, Johnson famously criticized the South and the glorification of a war that had been lost because “God Almighty had decreed that slavery had to go.”
According to biographer Vincent Fitzpatrick:
“In Johnson’s published assessments, the Agrarians had a flawed vision of Southern history; they gloried in a storybook past that existed only in their own minds. Moreover, he thought them sheltered from the more unattractive aspects of contemporary Southern life. He recognized that they were highly literate, patriotic, and well-intentioned, but he found them a dangerous foe that needed to be vanquished. The Agrarians, in turn, saw Johnson as a flaming liberal, a Menckenite, and a turncoat, now living with the enemy, whose criticism profaned his native land.” – Gerald W. Johnson: From Southern Liberal to National Conscience, Vincent Fitzpatrick
Frederick Phillip Steiff promoted this romanticized view of Southern sensibility in “Eat, Drink & Be Merry in Maryland.” Nonetheless, he proudly included Johnson’s recipes for “Stuffed Eggplant” and “Artichokes from Armenia” along with the short bio of Johnson. The two men possibly met through connections at the Hamilton Street Club, which is said to have been the nexus of Johnson’s Baltimore social life.
Gerald W. Johnson’s writings stand in contrast to his friend and Sun paper colleague H.L. Mencken. Johnson wrote with a fair share of outrage, but a sense of optimism in a time when social change appeared to be underway. In 1965, he wrote:
“The historical significance of this republic is simply that it affords men an opportunity to learn how to be free, unhampered by the bonds that Church and State have laid upon the generations of the past; but every rational man knows that the heaviest bonds of Church and State were not as weighty as the gyves locked upon our wrists by passion, prejudice, ignorance, and superstition.”
Despite Gerald W. Johnson’s tirades against inequality, Fitzpatrick points out that Johnson still paradoxically defended segregation and was known as a “liberal segregationist.” Again: there are no heroes in history. Johnson’s writing attempted to turn an eye on the contradictions of society – many of which we are still grappling with today.
Recipe:
eggplant
salt
Ground meat (esp lamb)
small amount cooked rice
Seeded raisins
Black pepper
breadcrumbs
butter
Remove the stem from the eggplant and cut it in half lengthwise. Boil in salted water until the meaty inside of the eggplant is tender enough to be scooped out with a spoon, (about fifteen minutes). Mix the scooped out eggplant with ground meat, preferably lamb (*I seasoned my lamb with ras el hanout and it was great), a small amount of cooked rice, some seeded raisins and salt and pepper to taste. Pack the mixture back into the shell, and place in a greased baking dish. Sprinkle with breadcrumbs and dot with butter, and bake at 375° for fifteen minutes, or until the top is lightly browned. (Maybe stick it under the broiler for a few seconds for a more dramatic effect.)
Recipe Adapted from “Eat, Drink & Be Merry in Maryland”
