In the early 1970s, a popular new drink began to make appearances in advertisements and nightlife coverage.
Charles McHarry of the New York Daily News reported in his “On The Town” column:
“La Seine now has a drink called the Harvey Wallbanger, an import from Malibu, and here is how it was born: Seems a surfer known as Harvey bounced into a Malibu pub one night after a heavy day of hanging ten. He asked for a screwdriver and then as an afterthought asked the bartender to float an once and a half of Galliano on it. He finished the portion and promptly walked into the nearest wall. Hence Harvey Wallbanger, and it is not recommended at a lunch of less than two hours.”
Similarly, Mickey Porter of the Ohio Akron Journal announced that the Brown Derby bar would be “the first in the area to feature the Harvey Wallbanger, a drink imported from Malibu, and here’s how it was born…” You can guess the rest.
Mrs. Brown, the first-nameless protagonist of playwright Chandos Fulton’s 1873 novelette, responds witheringly to the news that a friend’s daughter has wed a man of modest means. “It was a love-match, I suppose,” her friend Mrs. Campbell told her, and Mrs. Brown “did not deign a reply.”
As the plot of Fulton’s novel unfolds, Mrs. Brown meddles in her own daughter Adele’s romantic life, breaking off a would-be “love-match,” to fix Adele up with a wealthier suitor. Adele’s marriage to the moneyed fellow is an unhappy one, and a scandal breaks out when people incorrectly suspect Adele of having an affair with another man. It turns out that Adele was just lonely, and when Adele’s cold-but-wealthy husband Mr. Dick comes to understand this, he becomes an ideal husband on command. Adele Brown and her ambitious busybody mother both get a happy ending. The original love-match man who broke Adele’s heart due to Mrs. Brown’s scheming in Chapter Four is never mentioned again.
Mrs. Brown’s desire for Adele to marry a wealthy man is symbolized by a status-symbol that serves as the book’s title: “A Brown Stone Front.”
Newspapers in New York City had been advertising “brown stone front” buildings for sale and rent since the 1840s. Other cities followed suit, and a “brown stone front” remained an attractive selling point in real-estate for the better part of the following century.
What was originally a cheaper and easier-cut alternative to marble and limestone became synonymous with success in America.
When I finally took a stab at baking the Shady Side specialty Hard Jelly Cake, I nervously wondered how my reputation would fare.
Treading in the steps of experts is always a setup for embarrassment. If my beaten biscuit experience taught me anything, it’s that the flame-keepers of some of our state’s more forgotten foods tend to take their responsibility seriously. When my attempt cast disgrace on the reputation of beaten biscuits, seasoned bakers did not hold back criticism.
As I explored the history and culture of Hard Jelly Cake, one of Maryland’s more obscure traditions, I found a similar wellspring of passion.
Mrs. Edgar Linton’s recipe in the 1966 cookbook “Maryland’s Way” is the only recipe for it in my database so far. “This is an old southern Maryland receipt,” wrote Linton, “popular at Christmas time. A Shady Side specialty, it keeps very well and looks festive when sliced thin.”
With only Linton’s recipe to go on, I couldn’t really envision what the cake was meant to taste and feel like. A few years ago, my aunt from Shady Side purchased one from Elaine Catterton. Catterton is one of the few bakers carrying on the tradition, making cakes for raffle/sale around the holidays.
The wax paper wrapping and red string were clearly part of the experience of Hard Jelly Cake. The cookie-like layers were infused with the flavor of grape jelly. The cake was not like any cake I’d ever had before.
“And so we are really going to have a tea room after all; it is to be a perfect love of a place, all little blue and white China teacups, and walls papered in cunning blue figures, and the name of this delicate place of amusement is going to be the ‘Dutch Tea Room.’ If you have happened to go to Baltimore, or visit Baltimore, or have friends who have, why you know all about the little tea room there that has the same name and has – been run by society girls for the past several years.” – The Times Dispatch, Richmond, VA, 1912
In 1907, Harriet Stanton Blatch met her friend Hettie Wright Graham for dinner. The destination was the famous Hoffman House hotel in New York. The “palace hotel” was known for fine food, expensive artwork, celebrity guests, and rye whiskey. Blatch and Graham took the elevator up to the fashionable rooftop garden dining area but were denied a table. The owner told Blatch that women diners were not allowed without a male escort. The policy was meant to protect women such as Blatch and Graham from having to dine near “objectionable” women. “When I have been annoyed it has been by men,” Blatch remarked. “I do not suppose you make any effort to keep objectionable men out.” She attempted to sue the hotel, and lost.
In the decades after the Civil War, a glamorous new era of restaurant dining was emerging. It wasn’t considered respectable for women to dine without male accompaniment in these places.
Clothing sale in the Dutch Tea Room, 1913
At the same time, women were spending more time outside of the home, whether it was working, shopping, or socializing. In “Ten Restaurants That Changed America”, author Paul Freedman wrote that “the period from 1890 to 1910 saw the proliferation of many types of middle-class restaurants, ranging from those featuring Chinese and other foreign cuisines to tearooms, coffee shops, cafeterias, and other inexpensive but orderly places to have lunch. These were not necessarily intended exclusively for women, but the fact that they did not serve alcohol made them seem appropriate places for unaccompanied women to dine.” (Note: Some accounts claim that it wasn’t always tea in those ladies’ teapots!) These types of establishments offered up “decorous but economical refuge, a midday oasis of sorts, where women who were shopping could dine and recuperate, or where women who worked in offices or stores could have a tranquil if more hurried lunch.”
A 1904 article in The Carlisle Pennsylvania Sentinal advised that opening a tea room was “a profitable occupation for women,” as long as the woman had “a business head and [knew] how to count up profit and loss” as well as experience “making all kinds of cakes in the best homemade way.”
Baltimore was the 6th-largest city in the United States around this time, and had a number of tea rooms. The most famous and enduring is the tea room in the Women’s Exchange. Department stores like Hutzler’s had a tea room inside the store. The Parkway Theater on North Avenue had a tea room which was “swarmed” with people waiting for the second showing of films each day. In segregated Baltimore there was also at least one Black-owned tea room – “The Little Gem” in Sandtown on Robert Street.
In 1914, author Julian Street came to Baltimore and visited the Women’s Exchange where he encountered a “great numbers of ladies sitting upon tall stools and eating at a lunch-counter.” He described the sight as “a somewhat curious spectacle, perhaps, but neither pleasing to the eye nor thrilling to the senses.”
1915 promotional cookbook showing “Dainty” food, Duke University
In the mid-19th century, American society began to develop the stereotype that women preferred different kinds of foods than men. Delmonico steak might be alright for men, but women require something “daintier” – things like cakes, fruit, salads, and egg dishes.
“The development of dining-out options for women was accompanied by a growing sense that women had their own preferences and could, at least in the company of other ladies, indulge them. The obvious advantage of all-female lunches was that women could partake of what they actually liked to eat.” – Ten Restaurants That Changed America
The tea rooms became a place not just for socializing but for politics including suffrage and prohibition. The Southern Tea Room at 206 Park Avenue hosted lectures on women’s suffrage and greeted suffragette Alice Paul with a reception in 1910.
Alice Paul visits the Southern Tea Room, Baltimore Sun, 1910
Marguerite Schertle was a tea room waitress for nearly 80 years. At age 92 she was profiled in “Maryland’s Vanishing Lives” where she shared the memories of tea room culture, where the customers were known by name as “Miss this and Miss that,” desserts like butterscotch and charlotte russe were still served, and where oftentimes sisters were employed side by side. Her own sister “Miss Anna” had worked with her at the Women’s Exchange until her death in 1992. The women had even married “look-alike” brothers and started families in adjacent bungalows in Hamilton. Schertle passed away in 2001 at 100 years old.
Before her half-century-long tenure at the Women’s Exchange, Schertle had worked for 20 years across the street at the Dutch Tea Room at 314 N. Charles.
The Dutch Tea Room had been opened in 1904 by Natalie Cole, who was, according to the Baltimore Sun, a “lady of social standing.” The popular tea room was even visited by President Wilson – almost. In 1913 he stopped by with his family but the place was too crowded so they went to the Rennert instead. Cole still got to serve her country in 1917, when the tea room baked 300 “extra fine” fruit cakes for soldiers at Camp Meade.
In 1918 Natalie Cole married William Wilson Galbreath, who is listed in some directories as a salesman of “porcelain products.” Hmm. Cole and her husband passed away in 1959 and 1952, respectively. I’m not sure when the Dutch Tea Room actually closed for business.
An October 1904 Baltimore Sun article claimed the great fire in February brought enterprising women to open lunch rooms
According to the Baltimore Sun obituary for Marguerite Schertle, when she’d worked at the Dutch Tea Room she had baked “Lady Baltimore, orange and Wellesley fudge cakes.”
I don’t have recipes for those cakes but I found a recipe in an undated, unpublished manuscript for a “Martha Washington Cake,” attributed to the Dutch Tea Room. The cake is actually a predecessor to Boston Creme Pie, with a custard filling and minus the chocolate topping. Although Boston Creme Pie has been sometimes called “Washington Pie” (or Cake), the Martha name is rarer – it’s typically known as a “Martha Washington Cream Pie.” The name is obviously more dainty and befitting a tea room.
Early 20th century menus suggest that both a cup of tea and a slice of cake would run about fifteen cents – $1.92 in today’s money. At that price, I could go for a tea room lunch. Myself and most dainty ladies would be quick to notice that it leaves more money and appetite for a burger and a beer for dinner. Male accompaniment optional, thanks.
Recipe:
Cake:
½ cup sugar
½ cup flour
3 eggs
Beat yolks then add the sugar. Fold in stiffly beaten whites, then gently fold in flour, stirring as little as possible. Bake in one cake tin. (A smaller taller cake might be preferable to the 9″ tin I used.)
Filling:
1 cup milk
1 egg
½ cup sugar
¼ cup flour
vanilla to taste
Scald the milk. Beat flour, sugar and egg in a separate bowl then mix in ¼ to ½ cup of the scalded milk. Return to pan and cook over medium heat until thickened. Cool thoroughly.
Split the cake vertically and spread filling in the middle. Top with powdered sugar.
I’ve never really been a “cake person.” For baking and eating, my memories tend to reside in the pie zone.
Then last year, when I graduated from reading the published canon of Maryland cookbooks on to the special collections at Maryland Historical Society, I began to notice a high ratio of cake recipes in personal cookery books. As I spent hour after hour poring over these old manuscripts (sometimes procrastinating on a lunch break – that didn’t help), I eventually started to feel like I was as intrigued by all of these cakes as the women who’d collected them.
But that’s not entirely possible, for reasons I will explain.
Good Housekeeping, 1890. Contains many variations on Silver Cake aka “Foundation Cake”
First I must mention what you will find in the average 150-year-old personal cookbook.
These books are often a combination of hand-written recipes and newspaper or magazine clippings. Some are fairly small and others contain such an overwhelming chaos of recipe scraps that you can easily imagine the compiler making a weekly hobby of collecting recipes from the newspaper ladies page or her subscription to “Good Housekeeping.”
These aren’t treasured family recipes any more than your average pinterest board.
I began to see a correlation between these recipes and the facebook videos shared by family and friends. (Hey cousins-o-mine – did you ever *really* get around to making those cheddar-ritz cracker-buffalo-chicken bites?) Watching these videos lets us live the sensation and imagine the tastes of familiar ingredients combining into something new. With that in mind, it’s easy to see how the infinite combinations of flour, sugar, eggs, and butter offered a middle-class 19th-century woman an opportunity to escape into a fantasy (and occasionally to live the reality) of impressing friends, baking a treat for her family, and of course – personal enjoyment.
This 1826 magazine contained cooking receipts as well as information on gardening, drunkenness, and public abuses. That’s news you can use!
In “Cake: A Slice of History,” author Alysa Levine traces the history of cakes up from breads and dense fruit cakes on to the cultural changes that made lighter, sweeter cakes so appealing to 19th-century home cooks. “American bakers,” she writes, “did not remain wedded to their British heritage of rich fruit cakes for long. They soon lost most of their fruit and brown sugar, in favor of the rich whiteness of pound or Savoy cake… Appearances started to matter, and especially cakes which made an impression on the buffet table.”
The most important factor would be the decreasing cost of sugar. Sugar made its way into American diets through the 18th-century and left people craving more and more. Technological advances like better ovens and baking powder helped make cakes a realistic and attractive vehicle for a dose of sugar served at a special gathering or an afternoon ladies luncheon. With the amount of sugar at our disposal today, we can experience only a fraction of the excitement that the original compilers of the recipe books found in MDHS might have experienced when they clipped or copied these recipes.
Trade cookbooks from the baking powder and appliance companies, in addition to newspapers and magazines, helped to spread cake recipes nationally. “Even the ascetic Catherine Beecher included recipes for the popular pair of silver and gold cakes (one made with egg whites and one with yolks), often cut to show their insides and presented alternately down the table,” writes Levene.
After coming across similar recipes a dozen times in old manuscripts, I opted to make the famous Silver Cake, which, having been popularized just before the widespread availability of vanilla, was frequently sweetened with almonds and sometimes rose-water.
Advertisement, “The Favorite Receipt Book and Business Directory”
The recipe that I used comes from “The Favorite Receipt Book and Business Directory,” an advertisement-packed little book compiled in 1884 by the Ladies Aid Society of the Church of the Holy Comforter in Baltimore. The book offers up pages of bossy advice on housekeeping and social observances plus recipes, including over fifty for cakes. I chose a silver cake recipe calling for ‘sour cream’ even though this ingredient in 1884 would be meant more literally. I used modern “sour cream” which had been watered down with some milk.
According to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink In America, the popularity of Silver and Gold cakes were “rapidly dwindling” by the end of the Civil War, to be reformulated and replaced by white and yellow cake. For me at least, working backward has changed my views on cake somewhat. Using modern knowledge about the cake order of operations (creaming butter and sugar, eggs one at a time, alternating dry & wet ingredients), these old recipes have a great texture and please the sweet tooth – all in all, they are well worth the fantasy.
Recipe:
I used:
1 Cup butter
2 Cups sugar
3 Cups flour
.3 Cup sour cream plus milk to make ½ cup
8 egg whites
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 Teaspoon almond extract
Baked at 350° for 20-25 minutes in two round cake pans & stacked & iced with buttercream.
