“If alum is something to be proud of why conceal it on the label in type as small as the law permits?” – Alum in Baking Powder, 1927, Royal Baking Powder Company “Today, the Royal Company is manufacturing and selling a phosphate type of powder such as they condemned and classed as a mineral…
The opening of the Atlantic Hotel in 1875 is often regarded as the official “founding” of Ocean City. If you wanted to visit the little beach town in those days, you had to take a boat or a train across the Sinepuxent Bay. Train passengers often arrived to town covered in ash and soot. Nonetheless,…
The books that got me curious about Maryland food were not Maryland cookbooks, strictly speaking. This cookbook set had been a constant in my household growing up, and I never thought of them as regional at all, despite the “Southern” in the name. On my mother’s kitchen bookshelf they served as a source of inspiration and…
I found this rare little church cookbook at the Kelmscott Bookshop a few months ago. It’s got a bunch of old photographs and a brief history of a town in Maryland right on the Pennsylvania border, Bentley Springs. “On October 4, 1837, the Baltimore and Susquehanna Railroad obtained a right-of-way from William Dorsey and leveled…
“An old almanac in the Goschenhoppen Folklife Library contains a woodcut showing a farm boy with a baseball-bat size club whacking away at a walnut tree. The late Thomas R. Brendle records the practice of waking-up young fruit and nut trees that are reluctant to start bearing by beating them with club. The folk practice…