“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…
The “Purviance Family Papers” at Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library contain a near syllabus of early U.S. History: “Revolutionary War activities”, “Civil War veterans’ activities”, “U.S. relations with Napoleon.” They also contain some of the oldest Maryland cooking manuscripts – two small books filled with handwritten recipes, remedies (my favorite…
One of the most vivid descriptions of the joys of foraging for wild food was written by Edna Lewis in “In Pursuit of Flavor,” the 1988 follow-up to her influential book “The Taste of Country Cooking.” She wrote in the present tense about the tastes from her childhood in Freetown, Virginia, where both cultivated and…
“Dozens of AFRO readers… have kept the AFRO switchboard busy since last week’s edition published a recipe for cornbread made by Mrs. Ronald [Fanniejoe] Reid of 1306 W. Lanvale St.” – Afro-American, February 4, 1956 After The Afro-American printed Harlem Park resident Fanniejoe Reid’s cornbread recipe in January 1956, the recipe kind of went ‘viral.’…
If there were definitive proof that fudge was invented in Baltimore, we’d never hear the end of it.