Tag: Black-Eyed Susan Country: A Collection of Recipes

Strawberry Pretzel Salad, Dee Carney

“Strawberry Pretzel Salad” is the stuff of potluck legend. Fruit; Jell-o; creamy whipped filling; and then – surprise! – a crunchy salty bottom-crust. It requires just enough assembly to be special. It’s quirky enough to be memorable. It’s the kind of “Suzie Homemaker” recipe that gets frequently requested from newspapers, and that people love to claim is of their own inspired invention.

Pretzels used as a crumb crust for pies may not be as ubiquitous as graham crackers, but the idea is not unheard of. 1950s recipe columns encouraged home cooks to give pretzel crust a try. “Sounds dizzy but tastes great,” the Orlando Sentinel declared in 1953. The Warren County Observer in Pennsylvania promised readers that they would “say it has a crunchiness and toasty taste that’s perfect for a lemon meringue pie” in 1954. Pretzel crust lemon chiffon pie became a new twist on lemon pie and other desserts.

Many online sources incorrectly state that the salad originated with the 1963 “Joys of Jell-o” cookbook. L.M. Zoller of the “I’ll Make It Myself” food blog wrote a great little zine on the topic and debunked this. L.M. noted that the earliest known (as of this post) instance of the dish in the 1960 “Brentwood Civic Club Cookbook” from Brentwood Pennsylvania, contributed by Gerry Franz Sullivan, a daughter of second-generation German immigrants in the Pittsburgh area.

Some sources also refer to this as a “Southern” dish for whatever reason, but we won’t bother with that. I believe that the layered strawberry concept may have appeared in Jell-o recipe books – but the pivotal flourish- the pretzel crust – was not included. Without that it’s just a Jell-o fruit salad.

The first newspaper appearance of Strawberry Pretzel Salad that I found was in 1972, in the Chicago Tribune, as “Pretzel-Crust Strawberry Dessert,” attributed to Mrs. Paul Meiners. I can’t identify Mrs. Meiners for certain, but I found a Paul Meiners in the Chicago area, the son of German immigrants.

In June 1974 the recipe appeared in the Bemidji, Minnesota Pioneer “Cooking with Candace” column under the more fetching name “Strawberry Pretzel Surprise.”

Picking strawberries near Plant City, FL, c. 1928, loc.gov
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Baltimore Peach Cake**

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This recipe for an alternate version of Baltimore Peach Cake** comes from “Black-Eyed Susan Country,” another popular Maryland fund-raising cookbook.

This particular book, first printed in 1987, raised money for St. Agnes Hospital. Onetime St. Agnes Auxiliary president Mary Parga was a volunteer at the White House, and used her connections to compile the book’s notable “VIP” section. Barbara Mikulski’s crab-cake recipe makes an appearance, as well as [William Donald] “Schaefer’s Wafers.” The book also contains recipes from famed restaurants Tio Pepe, and the defunct Rudy’s 2900 and Chez Fernand. Recipes were also contributed by First Lady Nancy Reagan, and wife of then-Vice President George Bush.

This peach cake recipe was contributed by Mary Jo Krebs, an Arbutus resident who passed away in 2014. Both Mary Jo (born Gibson) and her husband Alcuin had Baltimore city roots going back many generations. Alcuin served in World War II before returning to Baltimore, graduating from Loyola and teaching in Baltimore public schools. 

** So, no, this so-called “Baltimore Peach Cake” is not the yeast-risen, glazed cake we hear so much about. This was another beast entirely; a delicious, moist, cinnamony beast. By any other name it would taste just as sweet.

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Recipe:

  • 1 Tablespoon softened butter
  • 1 Cup sugar
  • 2.5 Cup flour
  • 3 Teaspoon baking powder
  • 1.5 Cup milk
  • .75 Cup sugar
  • 2 Teaspoon cinnamon
  • 5 peeled and sliced peach, fresh
  • 2 Tablespoon melted butter

Preheat oven to 350°. Blend first five ingredients with electric mixer.  Spread in greased and floured 13 x 9 inch inch cake pan and sprinkle with one half of cinnamon-sugar. Arrange peach slices in rows on top of the dough. Sprinkle with remaining cinnamon-sugar and drizzle with melted butter. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes.

Recipe adapted from Black-Eyed Susan Country: A Collection of Recipes by St. Agnes Hospital Auxiliary Committee

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Sources: Community Cookbooks

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Community cookbooks are a mixed blessing for me.
On one hand they’re such a fantastic window into the kitchens of the more middle-class citizens as opposed to the fabulous lifestyles of “Eat, Drink & Be Merry in Maryland” or “Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen.”

Flipping through the pages you can see changing trends, adventurous cooking and old family recipes, and pride and love expressed in (mostly) housewives feeding their family and friends.

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The Park School Cook Book (1964), Art Work Miss Grace Van Order

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Loyola Recipes(1974), sketches by Eileen F. Bolgiano

On the other hand there are HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of these books, churches and schools making slight updates, revising year after year and it’s a bit hard to keep up with or to fit into bookshelf and budget.

According to “Food & Wine”:

The first community cookbook was published during the Civil War. Yankee women determined to raise money for field hospitals organized themselves into what they called “Sanitation Commissions” and devised a way to make their domestic skills marketable: At a fair held in Philadelphia in 1864, they offered their own recipes under the title A Poetical Cook-Book…

After the war, women’s clubs organized cookbook projects to benefit widows, veterans and orphans. By 1915, as many as 6,000 community cookbooks had been published in the United States, and women were raising money to fund kindergartens and promote temperance and other political causes.

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Magician in the Kitchen(1980), Federated Garden Clubs of Maryland. drawing: Mrs. David MacTaggart, Jr., Gibson Island

One of the oldest Maryland community cookbooks available on Google Books is “Tested Maryland Recipes,” compiled and published by the Ladies of the Presbyterian Church, Chesapeake City Maryland, that book contains assorted classics of Maryland cooking such as white potato pie as well as household advice such as tips “to keep ice.”

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Tested Maryland Recipes

Queen Anne Goes to the Kitchen is perhaps one of the more famous of Maryland Community Cookbooks. It was first published in 1962 by The Episcopal Church Women of St. Paul’s Parish in Queen Anne’s County. That book bears many Maryland ancestral names and an assortment of contemporary and family recipes as well as some nice illustrations.

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Queen Anne Goes to the Kitchen, Artwork: Stephanie Thompson, Sally Clark, Hallie Rugg

However, it takes an assortment of these types of cookbooks to compile a reasonable cross-section of Maryland food. In some school cookbooks we might find a more diverse array of names suggesting the ongoing immigrant contribution to Maryland menus.

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Magician in the Kitchen(1980), Federated Garden Clubs of Maryland, Recipe Sketch Mrs. William G. Hill, Jr., Garden Club of Frederick

For the time being, I try to draw the line at buying books published after 1990. It’s a pretty arbitrary rule although it is likely that the proliferation of food blogs, cooking websites, and the internet recipe commentariat have chipped away at the vitality of a community cookbook in a typical household in that span of time. Meanwhile, thousands of community cookbooks continue to float around indefinitely, finding their way into the hands of historians and fanatics.

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Black-Eyed Susan Country(1987), Published by the Saint Agnes Hospital Auxiliary, art James E. Toher, M.D.

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Mrs. Jas S Hopper (Ella Griffith), editor of “Tested Maryland Recipes, Bethel Cemetry, Chesapeake City (findagrave.com)

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