These two recipes come from a cookbook put out by the “Tuscanna Chapter No. 24, Order of the Eastern Star “ in 1932. As with previous masonic cookbooks I’ve cooked from, I can’t really come up with a lot of information. Order of the Eastern Star certainly has a cool-ass logo though! Open to both men and women, the “O.E.S.” was “approved as an appendant body of the Masonic Fraternity in 1873.” (wikipedia) Chick.com declares the order a “cult” which “no Christian woman should join.”
The Tuscanna chapter was established in Baltimore sometime around 1913, and occasionally appeared in the news hosting banquets and parties, such as a 1931 “measuring party” which awarded a prize to the person with the smallest waist.
Baltimore’s Front Street Theatre had undergone “extensive alterations and improvements” in 1850. Carpenters Carnan & Eckert built out a parquet for standing room theatergoers. “Skillful” painter John Delpher was hired to apply a fresh coat of paint. New curtains were hung, and 600 cushioned seats with spring-backs were installed.
A decade and a half later, Abraham Lincoln would be nominated as the republican presidential candidate in “the old Front Street Theatre”; through the years the theater was scene of the occasional theft or shooting. Those events would fade from memory long before the concerts that necessitated the 1850 renovations.
Hundreds of Baltimore citizens gathered in the rain on Monday December 9th, 1850 for a chance at tickets to see Jenny Lind, “The Swedish Nightingale,” live in concert. Front row tickets went for the modern equivalent of a few thousand dollars. Many would-be concertgoers were dismayed that many of the remaining tickets – about 1900 in all, were quickly bought up for resale.
For the next few days, ads appeared in the Baltimore Sun, offering tickets to see Jenny Lind. Businesses that didn’t have tickets to sell advertised hats to wear to the concert, “Jenny Lind Bouquets” for the concert, “Jenny Lind Candy” bearing “a perfect likeness of the divine songstress.”
It’s pretty rare that I should have *too much information* about a person associated with a recipe. For years now I’ve sighed in frustration when all I can find on someone is a date of birth, a passing newspaper mention, a headstone.
This week’s recipe comes from a woman who has been so scrutinized and written about that there is practically no point in summarizing her life story.
Wallis Simpson, The Duchess of Windsor, remains a fascinating figure to many. Any time members of the British royal family come up in the news, many Baltimoreans like to reflect on our city’s brush with royalty.
“The Baltimore Sun rises to remark that its idea of a ‘sane Fourth [of July]’ is ‘oodles of fried chicken, deviled eggs and chocolate ice cream. It may be all right for the Fourth, but it does not argue well for a comfortable fifth.” – Racine Journal, WI, July 4, 1911
For a while now I’ve been wanting to do a post where I compared some of the many deviled egg recipes in my collection. This post is hopefully part one of at least two.
When I pulled my various recipes for “Deviled Eggs,” “Picnic Eggs,” or “Stuffed Eggs,” I found some surprising trends. The “Stuffed Eggs,” as most 19th century recipes called them, were often broiled, baked, or even… deep fried. The fried eggs were typically seasoned then the halves reassembled, bound together with raw egg, and then breaded and fried. I decided that type of recipe was another category altogether so I set those aside for another day.
Other “Stuffed Eggs” recipes pretty much resemble a deviled egg with the added step of heating the eggs up. I’m not sure why exactly this fell out of favor – it may have been because deviled eggs became associated with picnic food.
The concept of “deviling” dates as far back as 1786, allegedly referring to the spicy mustard or cayenne pepper used to season foods.
The term was not limited to eggs and the wildly-popular deviled crab.
The 1845 UK cookbook “The Cooks Oracle” follows a recipe for an anchovy toast spread, adding that a “Deviled Biscuit” could be made with the same spread on a warm biscuit “with a sufficient quantity of salt and savoury Spice, Zest, Curry Powder, or Cayenne Pepper sprinkled over it.” In Maryland cookbooks, I have found recipes for deviled: oysters, turkey, fish, tomatoes, clams, ham, lobster, chicken, pecans, crackers, and cheese.
Eggs are probably one of the easiest items to “devil,” and as a result, the most enduring. Early 20th-century newspaper recipes offer a few variations – meats mixed in, using the vinegar from pickled beets. It was in the mid-century that people really started getting creative with deviled eggs. For this post, I present two 19th century recipes*, served cold, plus one from nearly a century later.
“Chutney Eggs,” from the Park School cookbook contain a salty-sweet mixture combination that was not as weird as I first expected. One taster commented that they tasted like “peanut butter and jelly.”
Next go-round, I’ll take a stab at some of the hot and deep-fried eggs. Maybe I will discover why they didn’t remain popular!
Stuffed or Picnic Eggs:
19 eggs, hard-boiled
ham, chopped
.5 Cup cream
1 raw egg, beaten
.5 Teaspoon salt
.5 Teaspoon pepper
1 Teaspoon mustard powder
.5 Teaspoon sugar
.5 Cup vinegar
Boil nineteen eggs twenty minutes, then put in cold water, when cool take off the shells, and cut in half, remove the yolks and fill the whites with this mixture: one cup fine chopped ham, yolks of seven of the boiled eggs moistened with a salad dressing of one-half cup cream, one egg, one-half tea- spoonful of salt, one-half teaspoonful black pepper, one level teaspoonful of mustard, one half teaspoonful sugar, beat all together, andthe last thing, add one-half cup sour vinegar, set in a kettle of boiling water and stir till it thickens.
Recipe from “The Favorite Receipt Book and Business Directory,” Ladies Aid Society of the Church of the Holy Comforter, 1884
🐔🐔🐔
Deviled Eggs:
12 hard-boiled eggs
a piece of butter the size of an egg
salt to taste
.5 Teaspoons sugar
.5 teaspoons mustard powder
1 tablespoon vinegar
parsley
1 dozen eggs; boil 20 minutes; throw into cold water to cool; peel and cut exactly in half; take out yolks; put them in small saucepan; add to them a piece of butter the size of an egg, a little salt, ½ teaspoonful of sugar, ½ teaspoonful of mustard, 1 tablespoonful of vinegar. Stir all together over fire until well mixed. When mixed put back into the place from which the yolk was taken so as to look like the natural egg; cut off the lower end of the egg, so as to make them stand on the dish. Dress with parsley; if used for breakfast put in oven and brown lightly.
Recipe from “Tried Recipes”, The Ladies Guild of the Associate Reformed Congregation, 1896
🐔🐔🐔
Chutney Eggs:
12 hard-boiled eggs
¼ to ½ Cup chutney
6 slices cooked, crumbled bacon
3 Tablespoons mayonnaise
Halve eggs. Mash yolks and add next 3 ingredients. Stuff eggs.
Recipe from Mrs. George Dalsheimer in “The Park School Cookbook,” 1964
* Special thanks to Atomic Books/Eightbar for hosting a deviled egg gathering, and to Kristina Gaddy for successfully creating the 1896 recipe for deviled eggs – accompanying photos c/o Gaddy.
“Western High May Become Coeducational Negro School,” the 1954 Baltimore Sun Headline read. Hand-wringing about school desegregation was splashed throughout the pages of the Sun that year. The issue that brought Western High to the front line of the fight was its status as an all-girls school. If the quality of education was unique in white single-sex institutions, then “separate but equal” was subject to question. The NAACP was challenging Baltimore Polytechnic Institute’s unique engineering program on similar grounds.
Enrollment had been dropping at Western, as its surrounding West Baltimore neighborhood became populated with black families whose daughters were barred from the school. Elizabeth T. Meijer of the Baltimore Urban League suggested the obvious solution – integrate the school. She wrote to the Sun that Baltimore was in a position to “not only show the U.S.A. but the whole world… that we not only preach but practice democracy.” Making Western High School an integrated girls’ school was not apparently seriously considered by the school board. There was talk of closing the school altogether.
The Soul Food Cook Book, 1971, Western High School
Ultimately it was decided that the school would relocate to the old City College location at Howard and Centre Streets. Frederick Douglass High School moved into Western’s old location at Gwynns Falls Road.
Thankfully, not everyone was satisfied with this outcome. In June 1953, Eugene D. Byrd wrote a passionate letter to the Sun chastising the school board for hiding behind “ancient views… of persons who cannot understand that God is Love and all mankind is the same in His sight.”
A few years later, a 1956 Sun report declared that the public had accepted the integration of schools, despite a flurry of agitator picketing and student absenteeism in September. By the 1960s, Western High School yearbooks exhibited an integrated student population, united by a common penchant for bouffant hair shellacked meticulously skyward.
Western High School remains a girls’ school to this day; the oldest public all-girls school in the United States (Eastern having gone coed in the early 80s.)
1970 Western High School yearbook, “Westward Ho!”
In 1971, Mrs. Sarah Cooper’s senior English class found out that the teacher was unfamiliar with soul food. The girls began to bring in dishes for Mrs. Cooper to enjoy. Eventually, the students even commandeered the home economics room, inviting the principal and vice principal to dine. “You couldn’t miss what was going on in that room,” said Cooper, “The whole school smelled of soul food.”
With the help of guidance counselor Maisie Rea, the social exchange became a project – the “Soul Food Cookbook.” Rea later explained to Baltimore Sun reporter Jane Howard: “There is no mild tasting soul food. It is more in the way food is seasoned that distinguishes it… we can fix the same dish but mine wouldn’t taste like yours.” Rea’s recipe for kidney stew is included in the book. “People of today rarely have time for the long, slow processes that were responsible for the tasty stews… of earlier days,” she wrote. “Members of my family, however, have held on to some of our traditional recipes.”
The Soul Food Cook Book, 1971, Western High School
The book contains recipes for cracklin’ cornbread, hog maws and chit’lins, black-eyed peas, and coconut pie, along with less famous dishes like peach upside-down cake and “caramel eggnog.”
This potato salad recipe was contributed to the book by Thomasina Falcon. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find much about her although I believe she was originally from Anson County North Carolina. She passed away in 1986.
In addition to the recipes, the “Soul Food Cookbook” is peppered with poetry and personal stories about family and food. Mrs. Beulah Taylor wrote that her recipe for cabbage with fatback drippings had been “handed down from generation to generation… as many times as [the] recipe has been handed down, it still tastes good every time.”
Recipe:
12 medium white potatoes, diced
2 diced onions
1.5 stalks diced celery
2 carrots, shredded
6 diced pickles
1.5 Tablespoons mustard
2.5 Teaspoons celery seed
4 Tablespoons mayonnaise
2 Tablespoons salt
1 Teaspoon pepper
2 Teaspoons sugar
1 Teaspoons vinegar
2 Teaspoons pickle juice
1 green pepper
“Bring potatoes to boil about 20 minutes until soft, but not too soft. Place potatoes in drainer and then put in refrigerator, after all the water is drained out. While potatoes are cooking, cut up onions, celery, carrots, pickles, and green pepper. Let potatoes stay in the refrigerator for about 1 hour or until cold. Put onions, celery, pickles, carrots and green pepper in the refrigerator.Take out potatoes, cut them into cubes, and put them in large mixing bowl. Then add your onions, celery, and pickles carrots and green pepper to potatoes and mix lightly. Next add celery seed, sugar, salt, pepper, and pickle juice and mix together. Then add mayonnaise (or Miracle Whip) and mustard and mix and stir together lightly. Add your vinegar a little at a time and mix.After salad is ready, put it back in the refrigerator so that potatoes can absorb seasonings until you are ready to serve. Garnish potato salad with lettuce, tomatoes, and radishes.”
Recipe from The Soul Food Cook Book, 1971, Western High School, found at the Enoch Pratt Free Library
the last of my family pickles made this salad extra special IMHO
Kneeling in the center with the black shirt and white vest is a “T. Falcon,” 1970 Western High yearbook
