beef Archives - OLD LINE PLATE

Slippery Pot Pie, Shirley Fout Miller

March 22, 2024March 23, 2024

“Shirley Fout Miller was a walking medical miracle.”

So opens her 2012 obituary in the Hagerstown Herald-Mail. “She contracted tuberculosis at age 12 from her mother… Shirley was not expected to live more than a few months.”

As an adult, she twice survived breast cancer and tuberculosis resurgence. Her daughter Holly Miller said, “She’s been cheating death for 75 years.”

Shirley spent many years being ill. Unable to participate in a lot of typical childhood and teenage activities, she turned to another outlet: art.

Shirley Fout Miller may not be a household name, but she left an admirable body of artwork celebrating regional and historic sites, including a calendar of sketches of Colonial Williamsburg, and prints of local sights in her hometown of Hagerstown.

*Shirley Fout Miller artwork of the Governor’s Palace in Colonial Williamsburg*

Miller’s obituary portrays a colorful and vivacious character. “She wanted to live in the kind of society of Edith Wharton and Jane Eyre,” Miller’s partner said.

“My mother was the queen of entertaining,” Shirley’s daughter Holly recalled. The obituary declared Miller’s life to have been filled with “style, entertaining and Chardonnay,” and invitations for guests to dine at a “beautiful table set with china, silver, flowers, and hand-painted place-cards.”

Shirley’s oldest son Barrick Miller said “She had such a zest for life. It came from the sanatorium, being a bystander in life for more than a decade. She had to figure out how to use this life that she didn’t expect to have.”

I had to figure out how to use some beef stock I didn’t expect to have, and I thought it a good opportunity to make a Pennsylvania-Dutch-influenced favorite, Slippery Pot Pie.

Many churches in the Hagerstown area make the dish as a fundraiser. A friend of mine who grew up there remembers it being served in the school cafeteria.

Despite the name, Slippery Pot Pie is not served in a crust. It is instead a variation on Slippery Dumplings, Chicken n’ Dumplings, or “Slick” Dumplings. Dumplings rolled out and cooked in a stew broth help to spread the ingredients further, creating a perfect hearty meal for a chilly evening.

Slippery Pot Pie is comfort food. I did not grow up eating this and yet I was somehow comforted by the feeling of biting into a dumpling, the rich gravy flavor, and the tender meat and veggies.

Chop-Chae, Ladies of the Bethel

February 10, 2024February 10, 2024

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.

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.”

Beef Stroganoff, Martha Ann Talbot

March 14, 2019January 21, 2020

I must admit I was pretty surprised to learn that Beef Stroganoff is actually Russian. I first met the creamy, comforting dish through our old pal Hamburger Helper. In community cookbooks, I’ve come across many recipes, most of which list a series of canned ingredients. I would’ve assumed Beef Stroganoff was some classic American ‘corporate shenanigans’, but I would be wrong!

The earliest recipe appears in an 1871 Russian cookbook, “The Gift to Young Housewives.” The decades encompassing the world wars enabled Beef Stroganoff to travel all around the globe, where it took on countless regional variations. In Nordic countries it’s made with sausage. In Japan it is served over white rice. In Brazil, it’s sometimes made with shrimp.

After WWII, when soldiers returned to the U.S. with a fondness for beef Stroganoff, the shortcuts like canned cream-of-mushroom soup made their way into the dish. Hamburger Helper introduced their version in 1971 – everything but the meat included in the box.

While most versions in the U.S. are generally made with a mushroom and sour cream sauce, my boyfriend grew up eating a version with tomatoes. I’ve come across a few tomato-containing Stroganoff recipes in community cookbooks and decided to give one a try.

*High Point High School yearbook featuring the winning band, 1976*

A Nice Little Dish of Beef

March 1, 2018January 12, 2019

A quick internet search reveals that most of the popular recipes these days have brief, memorable names. The exceptions are generally branded like “Cheesecake Factory Beef Wellington” or things that list their contents ala “Cheese, Potato, Sausage, Black Pepper, and Pimento Casserole.”

I do a lot of examination of the ways in which recipes get passed along, but what about their names?

I was at the Maryland Historical Society the other week doing my thing when I came across a recipe in Mrs. John Stump’s handwritten recipe book, for “A Nice Little Dish of Beef.”

“Mince cold roast beef very fine add chopped onion, pepper, salt & a little gravy, fill your dish two parts full, mash potatoes milk cream & butter & fill your dish, put it in oven to brown.”

The very un-catchy name stuck out at me so I did a search and found “A Nice Little Dish of Beef” in my database two other times. It’s printed in “Maryland’s Way,” where it is called “An original receipt” from the Ivy Neck papers from 1828. The other is from Mrs. B.C. Howard’s 1873 book “Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen.”

Those two recipes instruct the cook to “fill scallop shells two parts full” with minced beef and onion, before topping with creamy potatoes and butter and baking. I suppose the scallop shells make this dish of beef more “little” and perhaps even more “nice.”

I traced the recipe back to good old Mary Randolph, from whom Mrs. B. C. Howard and the author of the Ivy Neck receipt copied it verbatim, with name intact.

1856 issue of Southern Cultivator which printed the recipe for “A Nice Little Dish of Beef”

The word “nice” is used a lot in old cooking manuscripts, often as a comment from the author: “Tried this. Nice.”

According to the Oxford Dictionary:

“The word nice, derived from Latin nescius meaning ‘ignorant’, began life in the fourteenth century as a term for ‘foolish’ or ‘silly’. From there it embraced many a negative quality, including wantonness, extravagance, and ostentation, as well as cowardice and sloth. In the Middle Ages it took on the more neutral attributes of shyness and reserve. It was society’s admiration of such qualities in the eighteenth century that brought on the more positively charged meanings of ‘nice’ that had been vying for a place for much of the word’s history, and the values of respectability and virtue began to take over. Such positive associations remain today, when the main meaning of ‘nice’ is ‘pleasant’”

Perhaps this beef dish, a variant on shepherds or cottage pie (and obviously a use of leftovers), seemed a little bland or simple in comparison to the ostentatious plantation fare that Randolph’s reputation was associated with.

Whatever her logic, she derived the recipe from the popular 1806 British Cookbook “A New System of Domestic Cookery” by Maria Eliza Rundell. Rundell called it “Beef Sanders.” From there, it’s origin is lost, and the name unexplained.

We’ll never really know why Randolph renamed the succinct “Beef Sanders” to “A Nice Little Dish of Beef,” but it did have the interesting effect of starting a new, American continuance for the recipe, as it was copied again and again, name and all.

By the 1920s and 1930s, the recipe was occasionally published as “Scalloped Beef” or “Baked Minced Beef” before fading away altogether.

Which is a shame, because it is pretty tasty, versatile and hard to mess up. In a word, you know… nice.

Recipe:

From “Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen”

Recipe notes: I ended up with sliced beef but whole would probably be better. I went heavy on the butter since the beef was lean and I didn’t have cream for the potatoes. Would be excellent with a shallot!

Hamburgers Diane, Lynette M. Nielsen

June 10, 2017January 12, 2019

Hamburgers are one of those foods that are possibly under-represented in cookbooks due to their sheer simplicity. Although recipes for “hamburgh sausage” or “hamburg steaks” appear in cookbooks dating as far back as 1758, most of the hamburger recipes in my Maryland cookbooks come from the 1950s and 1960s. It was a time when there was a little more experimenting going on in home kitchens, and these recipes tend to have some special touch or sauce.

“Queen Anne Goes to the Kitchen” (1962), the source for this recipe, also contains recipes for “Belmost Sauce” and “Aloha Sauce” for hamburgers. “Hamburgers Diane” is a twist on Steak Diane, a popular dish at the time which, according to Wikipedia, “was considered dated by 1980.” Steak Diane’s origin isn’t entirely clear but it is often attributed to Chef Beniamino Schiavon of the Drake Hotel in New York. Table-side flambé, as seen in this recipe, was a popular fad in the mid-20th century.

Washington College yearbook, 1959

One completely baffling aspect to this recipe was an instruction to salt the pan and heat until the salt turns brown. I’m pretty sure that salt does not brown? Maybe the salt used in 1962 had some different impurities? I honestly don’t know so I ignored that instruction.

These burgers would be fine on a bun (brioche perhaps? to keep it fancy…) but I already had the wild rice thing going so we went bun-less.

All in all it was a tasty burger, but that is always going to come down to the quality of the meat and how you salt and cook it… not some gimmicky sauce.

The recipe contributor, Lynette Morgan Nielsen was born Esther Lynette Morgan in Montreal, 1912. Her mother, Esther Judson appears to have come from money.

Dealth of Lynette Nielsen’s grandfather, 1910, Post-Standard (Syracuse, NY)

Lynette’s grandfather Edward Barker Judson, Jr., according to one obituary, “was one of the grand men of Syracuse.” He was “the son of a wealthy father and the inheritor of a large fortune from his uncle” and became president of First National Bank of Syracuse. At some point Lynette married Orsen N. Nielsen, a U.S. Diplomat. The two traveled the world as he served in Russia, Sweden, Germany, Ireland, Iran and Australia. Orsen Nielsen retired from the U.S. Foreign Service in 1952 and the family settled in Centreville.

There, Lynette served as a trustee of Washington College. An annual art prize was named in her honor. She contributed to Atkins Arboretum at Tuckahoe State Park, and a mental health services annex of Queen Anne’s County Health Department, which was named in her honor. She passed away in 1984.

Lynette’s well-traveled and philanthropic life is yet another example of the many citizens who contributed to “Queen Anne Goes to the Kitchen,” now a classic Maryland cookbook whose reputation has spread throughout the state.

Recipe:

1 Lb good beef, ground
2 Tablespoon freshly ground black pepper
2 Tablespoons cognac
chives or onion pieces
butter

Shape beef lightly into cakes, sprinkle with pepper and press pepper into cakes. Let stand 30 minutes. Sprinkle a light layer of salt over bottom of a heavy frying pan. Turn heat to high, and when pan is hot [or when “salt begins to brown” according to the recipe??] add hamburgers.
Cook until well browned on each side, reduce heat and cook until done to taste. Place a pat of butter on each burger, pour cognac over top and set ablaze.
Sprinkle cakes with chives or dried onions before serving.

Recipe adapted from “Queen Anne Goes to the Kitchen”