One of the many changes that the pandemic caused in me was a reversal of my austere policy on hard-copies of cookbooks. Where once I had been donating my more rare books and avoiding paying for anything I could view in a library, I suddenly had the urge to build up my home collection more and more. Donations and acquisitions have nearly doubled the amount of books I have on hand.
One of the books I purchased is one of the earliest books that I had access to digitally, a slim 1884 fund-raising cookbook from Baltimore called “The Favorite Receipt Book and Business Directory,” produced by the Ladies Aid Society of the Church of the Holy Comforter.
The book is disappointingly anonymous, but the advertisements, which the book promotes as a feature, are plentiful and interesting.
Ads are sometimes the most illuminating part of a cookbook like this. Some books have a lot of ads that demonstrate a whole neighborhood’s worth of local businesses, like a phone book. It can present a window into what kind of goods were available. Ads for grocers offer insight into where the church’s women might shop. Ads for appliances show what would be the cutting edge kitchen equipment.
Robert H. Clark was one of the two-thirds of Civil War fatalities who died not from the violence on the battlefield, but of disease. The Canada-born Union soldier enlisted in the 7th Maine Infantry in August 1862 at the age of 23. He left behind his wife Mary Ann and one-year-old baby Henry Gilbert, and headed for Maryland. The Maine 7th took part in the Maryland Campaign and a battle at South Mountain, before fighting at Antietam, a significant and bloody turning point in the war.
Constant campaigning had cost the regiment the loss of many men. They returned to Portland, Maine through January of 1863 before reporting to Northern Virginia for more fighting, including the Union victory at the Second Battle of Fredericksburg. In June, the company would pass through Maryland on their way to the fateful battle at Gettysburg. As it happened, Robert H. Clark would never make it to Pennsylvania.
Sources differ on whether the young man had contracted typhoid or died from sunstroke. According to Lt. Colonel Selden Connor, men “fell out by scores… by the heat, dust and exertion” on the trip, some dying in the road.
Clark made it to a hotel in Westminster Maryland, where he was tended to by Mary Bostwick Shellman, a 14-year old who routinely volunteered with the care, feeding and entertainment of residents of the town almshouse. That day, the dutiful girl was caring for soldiers at the City Hotel, which was inundated with infirm soldiers passing through town between battles. She fanned Clark for hours, but it was in vain. Young Mary Shellman watched as Robert Clark died. She would never forget the experience.
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.”
Old black & white photographs of the ports of Baltimore bring to mind a gritty and sooty place; smog and ship steam and oyster shells. It is harder to imagine the loads of colorful & sometimes fragrant cargo coming into the port: tomatoes, bananas, coffee, citrus fruits. Much of it was headed to the city’s many canneries.
From April through July in the 1800s, the ports could expect thousands and thousands of pineapples shipped from the Bahamas. If the pineapples arrived ripened, they were shipped off to one of the dozens of packing houses. If they had gone bad, they were unceremoniously dumped into the harbor.
Baltimore saw lots of trade and plenty of fruit importation, but the pineapple fleet was greeted with “color and ceremony,” according to a 1940 Baltimore Sun reminiscence by Dean Wanamaker. “After a winter on the Chesapeake Bay, captains cleaned, painted and generally refurbished their ships… They tried to outdo one another. Coming into the harbor, they would fly all the flags and buntings they could get aloft.”
1842 Advertisement, Baltimore Sun
The schooners docked along Pratt Street and the packing houses would sound whistles to their workers to retrieve the cargo.
Baltimore was the primary touchdown point for pineapples from the Bahamas, the industry peaking around 1900, with millions of pineapples processed and millions of dollars made (adjusted for inflation).
These Bahamian pineapples were not the first pineapples that Baltimore had ever seen. Before the American Revolution, Charles Carroll the Barrister had an indentured convict gardener named John Adam Smith to oversee his Pinery. A visitor from Jamestown in 1770 wrote that Carroll’s pinery was expecting a yield of 100 “Pine Apples” the next summer. Attempts to grow the popular status symbol fruit were not uncommon at the time. Typically, manure would be piled around the rows of pineapples to emit heat during the colder months.
Carroll’s gardener absconded, as evidenced by a 1773 advertisement in the Maryland Gazette: “TEN POUNDS REWARD…Ran away…a convict servant man, named John Adam Smith…by trade a Gardener, has with him…a treatise on raising the pine-apple, which he pretends is of his own writing, talks much of his trade and loves liquor.” Perhaps this was the end of pineapple farming in Baltimore.
This recipe comes from “Wine and Dine with The Lake Roland Garden Club,” a 1935 book full of cocktails, canapés, and wine advice, plus the usual assortment of community cookbook recipes for cakes and weeknight dinners (or, as they called it in the Roland Park Garden Club, dinner “for the maid’s night off.”)
The recipe for Pineapple Ice Box Cake doesn’t have a contributor name, but I traced it to a 1933 Knox Gelatine recipe book. The Lake Roland Garden Club cookbook committee tastefully removed the brand name from the ingredients list, but other than that the wording is identical.
Icebox cakes developed in the early 1900s along with the increased popularity of… you guessed it, iceboxes. Originally they were made with a cooked custard containing eggs, but gelatin manufacturers were happy to step in and simplify the process. The Pineapple Icebox Cake is a match made in branding heaven: by this time, pineapple branding was in full force, but consumers were not reaching for canned pineapple from Baltimore.
Hawaii was taken as a U.S. Territory in 1898, and in 1900, Sanford Dole, who had been serving as “President,” became the territorial governor. Sanford’s cousin Edmund Pearson Dole came to Hawaii and parlayed his connections there to eventually build a canning empire. With the canneries close to the pineapple fields, and a low-paid immigrant workforce, canned pineapple became more cheap than ever. Dole’s branding of Hawaiian pineapples made them into an American staple.
Baltimore could not compete. One by one the Baltimore pineapple canneries closed. Wannamaker wrote that by 1940 “only a handful of shippers and packers remember[ed] that Baltimore was once the greatest pineapple center in the world.”
Recipe:
1 envelope gelatin
.25 Cup sugar
1 Tablespoon lemon juice
.25 Teaspoons salt
.25 Cup cold water
1 Cup canned crushed pineapple
lady fingers or stale sponge cake
.75 Cup whipped cream or evaporated milk
Pour cold water in bowl and sprinkle gelatine on top of water. Place bowl over hot water and stir until dissolved. Add pineapple, sugar, salt, and lemon juice. Cool, and when it begins to thicken, beat, and fold in whipped cream or whipped evaporated milk. Line sides and bottom of square or round mold with lady fingers (any stale cake may be used). Cover with pineapple cream mixture, then alternate cakes and cream until mold is filled. Place in refrigerator for three or four hours. To serve, unmould on cake place and garnish with whipped cream and strawberries in season. Fresh or canned strawberries, raspberries or peaches, or any preffered fruit may be used instead of the pineapple. Mosre sugar will be needed for fresh fruit.
Recipe from “Wine and Dine with the Lake Roland Garden Club,” 1935
