Tag: baltimore

Gertrude’s Crazy Chowder, Gertrude Comer

One of these days I’m going to stop choosing recipes before looking into whether there’s an uncover-able story. This is another new post with scant facts.
Still, I enjoyed looking into the life of Gertrude Comer, who contributed her “crazy” chowder to a cookbook put out by the Gatch Memorial United Methodist Church in the 1960s.

I do know that Gertrude lived most of her life in Northeast Baltimore, near where the Gatch Memorial United Methodist Church stands on Bel Air Road. In 1996, she told the Baltimore Sun about her desire to remain in the neighborhood. She looked forward to affordable senior housing being built nearby. “I would like to stay in my neighborhood and not have to repair an old house,” she said.

The old house in question was 5722 Belair Road, where Gertrude had lived with the Rubshaw family for many decades, just down the street from Gatch UMC.
I found Gertrude in many other peoples’ obituaries, including that of her mother, who died in 1961. Gertrude is mentioned, along with her sisters Helen Zepp, Mildred Kelly, and Betty Lou Rubshaw.

When and how Gertrude became a part of this family is a bit of a mystery. Her biological parents, according to her 2006 death certificate, were James C. Myers and Mary Jane Yager. Gertrude was born in West Virginia in 1916. The Rubshaw family, meanwhile, lived in Indiana at the time. By 1940, they had made their way to Martinsburg, WV, and Betty Lou worked with Gertrude at the Carlile Paper Box Company factory. They must have enjoyed working together – the sisters would later open a beauty parlor in Baltimore called the Shamrock Beauty Shop.

Gertrude’s death certificate, reclaimtherecords.org
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Chop-Chae, Ladies of the Bethel

Note: The following is an essay from “Festive Maryland Recipes,” posted here with the original recipe from the community cookbook. “Festive Maryland Recipes” contains an adapted version of this recipe.

After the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 removed discriminatory barriers to moving to the United States, Maryland gained a new population of Korean-born citizens. Naturally, these newly-minted Marylanders brought their celebrations with them. In the 60s and 70s, newspapers began to report on the festivities. A 1970 Lunar New Year event held at the Korean embassy in Washington, D.C. attracted Korean-born Marylanders from around the state. Helen Giblo, a reporter from the Annapolis Capital, described for readers the galbi and “kimchie, a dish that is a way of life in the Land of Morning Calm.” Also served was “dduk guk,” Rice Cake Soup – a Korean New Year essential.

Ladies of the Bethel, 1986

The Bethel Korean Presbyterian Church of Baltimore was founded in June of 1979, with a parish made up of seven families. “Everyone was on the same boat, sometimes literally,” Pastor Billy Park told the Baltimore Sun in 2002. By then, more than 1,700 people were attending Sunday services at the church.

The “Ladies of the Bethel” did not include a recipe for Rice Cake Soup in their 1986 eponymous cookbook. Perhaps the authors felt that the rice cakes were too difficult to acquire or to make. The recipes in the book often reflect the constraints of limited access to ingredients, and provide a contrast to today’s vicinity around the church (which moved to Ellicott City in 1987), an area now strewn with multiple international grocers such as H-Mart. 

The book does contain many other traditional recipes, with the intention, as Susan Y. Park, the cookbook chairperson wrote, “to introduce as many Korean recipes as possible to those who are accustomed to Western food.”

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Mayonnaise Cake, Marylee Felton

The Baltimore Sun ran a four-part series in the spring of 1988. The articles were about Baltimore City Public Schools, and they covered the usual woes we still contend with today – attendance, student performance, accountability, and standardized tests. The series was entitled “School Maze,” and was intended to “nettle defenders of the status quo.”

One family member of a student was surprised. They wrote a letter to share their positive view of Glenmount Primary School: “…when one enters the building [they notice] large well-made pictures on both walls of what the youngsters do and current events… Quietness is the order of the day. The PTA and other groups take part in the school work.” The reader, Frank J. Huebel shared anecdotes of his great-granddaughter learning math and reading and writing. “All of this tells me that Glenmount is a well-run school and that the youngsters are learning the basics, in spite of the ‘School Maze.'”

Huebel was not alone in his positive view of the school. A 1985 story about a blind student’s guide dog Lavette quoted the dog’s owner, Nancy Jaslow. “Everyone knows not to touch or play with a guide dog. My principal, Marylee Felton loves dogs and loves having Lavette around.”

A few decades after Lillian Lottier, Marylee Felton was taking the same path: serving the city and community through a career in education. Her position as a teacher and later as a principal would have her face school fires, understaffing, overcrowding, state politics, and all of the other tribulations faced by educators.

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Stuffed Cabbage With Parsley Cream Sauce, Mrs. Edwin Obrecht

Cabbage stuffed with meat is a classic combination, with variations all around the world. There’s Polish Gołąbki, cabbage rolls filled with meat and topped in tomato sauce. A Chinese version is stuffed with pork and mushrooms.

Early American versions involve stuffing the meat inside the cabbage, as The Townsends and Chef Walter Staib have both demonstrated on their shows.

I’ve made at least one other version of stuffed cabbage myself, and it is delicious— if unnecessarily finicky.

The recipe may have been a little old-fashioned by 1953, but Mrs. Edwin Obrecht contributed hers to “Random Ruxton Recipes,” compiled by the Church of the Good Shepherd. The church boasted a well-to-do congregation, and almost all of the recipe contributors I’ve researched were prominent in Baltimore newspapers. The original is fairly rare. I accessed it at the Enoch Pratt Free Library. Another version of the cookbook was printed in 1977.

Mrs. Obrecht was born Doris Laura Merle in 1919. Her grandparents were German. Her father, Andrew Merle, was the president of a distillery firm. According to Merle’s 1965 obituary, he “spent the Prohibition years as a broker of medicinal spirits” and then launched his firm, Standard Distillers Products, Inc., when Prohibition was repealed.

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Kapusta And Kilbash (and Sauerkraut for Thanksgiving)

A different version of this essay appears in Festive Maryland Recipes: Holiday Traditions from the Old Line State.

Sauerkraut came to Baltimore with German (and later, Eastern European) immigrants, but it made the leap to the dinner tables of Baltimore’s other citizens, in particular alongside the Thanksgiving turkey. 

Much has been written about this peculiar phenomenon, with a new flurry of articles and social media posts coming out each year.

In an Instagram post made by the catering company H3irloom Food Group, Chef Tonya Thomas posed proudly with a plate. “Thank you to all of our customers who ordered Chef Tonya’s sauerkraut to add to their holiday spread,” read the caption.

“No matter who you are and what your race, in Baltimore, sauerkraut is on the table at holidays,” Thomas told me. She can trace the sauerkraut tradition in her family back for generations, to well before the 20th century. When Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, Germans were the largest group of immigrants in Baltimore, she noted.

In many places where sauerkraut is eaten, it is stewed with meat cuts or sausages for extra flavor. This was a good fit for Black home cooks’ practice of using every part of an animal, and Tonya’s grandmother cooked hers with pigtails. Tonya eventually began to flavor her own sauerkraut with smoked turkey instead of pork. More recently, she has flavored the sauerkraut with vegetable stock and spices instead of meat, to accommodate H3irloom’s vegan guests. 

Sauerkraut spread in Festive Maryland Recipes

The formula for sauerkraut itself is so simple that only a handful of recipes appear in my Maryland cookbook collection. It’s also long been available for sale in prepared form.

In Elizabeth Ellicott Lea’s 1845 cookbook “Domestic Cookery,” the two recipes for sauerkraut are labeled as “cabbage,” suggesting that sauerkraut may have been the primary use for cabbage in her household.

The earliest Maryland recipe calling the dish by name is in the 1870 “Queen of the Kitchen,” by Mary Lloyd Tyson. Had Tyson wanted to, she could have purchased prepared sauerkraut at William Bodmann’s Pickling House and Vinegar Depot on Howard Street. 

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