NOTE: For a better at-home Baltimore Peach Cake recipe click here Baltimore Peach Cake seems to be the bane of local recipe writers. By 1966, Evening Sun food columnist Virginia Roeder was exasperatedly telling readers “as for peach cake, I have published the recipe several times.” In 1958, she wrote about how she was bombarded…
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…
“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…
Recipe seekers: For a better Smearcase cheesecake recipe post, click here! While many Baltimoreans get excitable about the annual Peach Cake tradition, Peach Cake’s Plain Jane cousin Smearcase gets somewhat overlooked. I do mean that literally. With a similar German origin to Peach Cake, Smearcase cake can often be found in the same bakery cases,…
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…