Vinegar is one of those culinary facts of life that existed for thousands of years before being truly understood. (Some probiotics enthusiasts might say that we still don’t truly understand vinegar.) With the ability to sterilize, preserve, and add flavor, vinegar has been made all over the world with as many source ingredients as can be imagined. Of these, the gold standard at the turn of the 20th century was Apple Cider Vinegar, especially in Maryland.
Home-made vinegar was certainly a simple option – there are instructions in Mary Lloyd Tyson’s 1870 “Queen of the Kitchen” for making vinegar with cider, fermented preserves, whiskey, and molasses. “This is an excellent receipt.”
Newspapers of the time offered similar instructions. They also printed many questions and theories on vinegar. “What makes vinegar sharp?” Does more surface area make better vinegar? Are vinegar eels good or bad for the flavor of the vinegar?
Flavor and sharpness aside, these were no trivial matters. With food poisoning so prevalent, the acidity and purity of vinegar could be a matter of life & death.
The Cecil Whig in Elkton reported in 1872 that “probably not one-half of what is sold as cider-vinegar ever had its origin in an apple tree.”
If there were definitive proof that fudge was invented in Baltimore, we’d never hear the end of it. Tourists would be encouraged to eat fudge-dipped crabcakes or whatever, and all the billboards in the city would be like “Sprint is the favorite network of fudge-lovers!”
Nevertheless, there is some intriguing evidence that ties the origins of fudge to the city. This was complete news to me when I recently checked out Stella Parks’ “Bravetart: Iconic American Desserts.” I was barely home from the library before I was contacting Atomic Books to order a copy of my own.
The cookbook contains a lot of historical background essays similar to some on this blog – but unlike Old Line Plate, “Bravetart” contains recipes that are actually useful. Aside from assuaging some of my dessert hang-ups (Hint: I grew up near the Hostess outlet), I found a lot of information that will help improve my baking, and this blog by extension. What put it over the top for me though was the quality of the research. I actually gasped aloud when I read Parks’ conclusion about the origins of the Oreo brand name.
One of the recipes in the book is for “Baltimore Fudge.” After years of researching Maryland food, it’s always exciting to find new things I was completely unaware of.
A 1995 piece in the Los Angeles times by Baltimore-born writer Steven Raichlen disseminated the Baltimore origins of fudge as reported by food historian John Mariani in the “Dictionary of American Food and Drink.” “When it comes to fudge,” Raichlen wrote, “Baltimore isn’t a bad place to come from.” Of course, the Sun reprinted that article so that readers could bask in this comforting fact.
The prevailing fudge origin story centers around a Vassar student, Emelyn Hartridge, who popularized the confection on campus; it then spread to other schools. Fudge-making remained associated with women’s colleges for decades. Hartridge, it turns out, is said to have gotten the recipe from a schoolmate’s cousin in Baltimore. (That’s how recipes go, especially sweet ones.)
Harrisburg Pennsylvania Daily Independent, 1903
By 1903, recipes appeared in regional newspapers for “Baltimore Fudge.” The women’s magazine The Delineator in 1907 referred to “…Baltimore caramels, a confection afterwards known as ‘January Thaw’ and now called ‘fudge.’” The “January Thaw” term is a little hard to search, but it doesn’t seem to have been as prevalent in old newspapers and cookbooks as “Baltimore Fudge” or “Baltimore Caramels.” When I surveyed other 19th-century recipes, it appeared that the major difference between the “Baltimore” chocolate caramels and others was that the Baltimore recipes usually don’t contain molasses.
Chocolate was primarily consumed in beverage form in the early days of the United States, and was most popular as a breakfast. The chocolate caramels that became popular in the mid-1800s required better control of heat. I won’t get on too much of a chocolate tangent but needless to say, there was a lot going on.
Candy and confection caught on more as the price of sugar went down and the quality of cooking technology improved. Its been written that 19th-century Baltimoreans tended to eat a lot outside of the home. Sweets like fudge could be had right alongside oysters in busy downtown markets.
Baltimore Sun, 1877
Confection recipes appeared in trade magazines for hotels and the like, but confectioners also had their own trade magazines. Books like “The confectioners’ hand-book,” printed in London in 1883, offer up fascinating detail of the processes involved in 19th-century candy-making.
An 1865 book, “The Art of Confectionery,” suggested that candy making was becoming an exciting pastime for housewives:
“While the preparation of soups, joints, and gravies, is left to ruder and stronger hands, the delicate fingers of the ladies of a household are best fitted to mingle the proportions of exquisite desserts… It is absolutely necessary to the economy of the household that this art should form a part of every lady’s education. This fact is becoming generally acknowledged, and the composition of delicate confections is passing from the hands of unskilled domestics into the business and amusement of the mistress of the household.”
I definitely have rude and unskilled hands but I gave it my best.
In “Iconic American Desserts,” Parks referenced the ‘caramels’ recipe found in the “The Favorite Receipt Book and Business Directory,” an anonymous advertising cookbook printed by a ladies’ church group in Baltimore in 1884. I was able to trace that recipe back to the 2nd published Maryland cookbook “Queen of the Kitchen,” by Mrs. M.L. Tyson in 1870.
The first Maryland cookbook (1859) was by killjoy Elizabeth Ellicott Lea who was not likely to promote frivolous treats like chocolate caramels. Her only chocolate recipe is for a drinking chocolate “for the sick.” You had to be sick to get chocolate or liquor in the Lea household.
After appearing in “Queen of the Kitchen,” the chocolate caramels recipe was subsequently printed in the classic “Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen,” by Mrs. B. C. Howard in 1873. Mrs. Charles H. Gibson also included it in her 1894 “Maryland and Virginia Cook Book.” In fact, that book includes SEVEN slight variations on the recipe. This made me decide that Mrs. Gibson is kind of irritating.
In the Los Angeles Times, Raichlen shared a fudge recipe from his grandmother. Although the ingredients are essentially the same, the order of operations involves dissolving the sugar before stirring in the chocolate. This recipe was reprinted in the Baltimore Sun Recipe Finder, where a reader described it as having “a smooth texture with a slight crust on the outside.” This is basically how my own fudge turned out, despite putting all the ingredients straight into the pan.
Stella Parks’ book has an updated Baltimore Fudge recipe which includes some white sugar to decrease the bitterness, as well as far more precise instructions and tips than found in the old Maryland cookbooks. In the years I’ve been doing this blog, I’ve actually grown disillusioned with famous chefs and cookbooks, but I endorse “Iconic American Desserts,”… that is, unless you work for Visit Baltimore in which case… move right along, nothing to see here.
Recipe:
1.5 Lb brown sugar
.25 Lb chocolate
1 teacup cream
.25 Lb butter
1 Tablespoon vanilla extract
“Mix together and boil twenty-five minutes; stir in one tablespoonful vanilla juice before pouring out to cool.“
Recipe from “The Favorite Receipt Book and Business Directory,” Church of the Holy Comforter (Baltimore, Md.). Ladies Aid Society, 1884
Warning: This is a pretty macabre story to go with a candy recipe post. It’s October, so if you want you could come up with some intrigue about ghosts in Greenmount Cemetery. If you are more the spiritual type you can think of the connections between food and communion with the dead.
A recent run-in with a bad head-cold scared me back into eating massive quantities of citrus fruit. After carefully removing the flesh and juice from a half-dozen grapefruits I figured I would finally try a common old recipe: candied citrus peel. Lemon and orange had been popular options in all of my oldest cookbooks but in the early 20th-century grapefruit really began to catch on.
Baltimore at that time had more diverse produce options than you would expect. While citrus fruit from Florida was a huge industry, the ports at the Inner Harbor were just as likely to receive shipments from Jamaica along with other items like coconuts and bananas. Occasionally fruit was even smuggled in. Many failed fruit smuggling efforts were reported in the pages of the Baltimore Sun from the late 1800s through 1910s.
In September of 1909 the Baltimore Sun reported that “Grape fruit is more popular each season, and is no longer considered a luxury, as formerly.”
For the most part, as you would expect, grapefruit was eaten for breakfast, juiced, or served more pretentiously scooped out and combined with other fruits back in their halved rind. If using both the fruit and the peel was not sufficient, the women’s page of the Sun had the following DIY hint in 1913: “the seeds of grapefruit have an æsthetic use which the lowly apple core has not, for if planted they will grow into a beautiful green vine.”
By 1931 the local grocery store Hopper & McGaw listed grapefruit as a “Thanksgiving specialty,” along with raisins, mince meat, figs and nuts.
“The Tried and True Recipe Book” at the Enoch Pratt Free Library
The cookbook I got my candied peel recipe from is not dated, but the call number at the Pratt Library implies it is from 1920. Entitled “The Tried and True Recipe Book,” it was compiled by the Woman’s Guild of the Church of St. Michael and All Angels in Baltimore. Lots of the surnames ring familiar to me from street names, Maryland families, and other recipes in my collection: Mosher, Sothoron, Diffenderffer, etc.
This recipe (as well as many others in the book ranging from soups to sweets) was contributed by Mrs. J. J. Forbes Shaw, the wife of a Baltimore banker and tobacco merchant. Born Harriet Alexander Hereford in Union WV in 1874, she hailed from well-known families. Her father, Frank Hereford was a senator and congressman. Her grandfather on her mother’s side, Hugh Elmwood Caperton, was also a congressman. The maternal side of her family are ancestors of William Gaston Caperton III, the governor of West Virginia from 1989-1997.
Harriet married James John Forbes Shaw in 1907, and the family lived at 1809 N. Calvert Street. They were fairly prominent, turning up in society columns in the Sun. In 1921, however, their mentions took a turn for the tragic.
Rev. Wyatt Brown, D. D., “The Tried and True Recipe Book”
Their 12-year old daughter Alice Caperton Shaw drowned when a rowboat containing the girl, her two sisters and three other children capsized on the Servern River. Reverend Wyatt Brown, whose photo appears in the front of “The Tried and True Recipe Book,” rescued the other five children. The many newspapers that covered the incident reported that he was a nervous wreck after the incident, covered in scratches from the children’s grasps.
Twelve years after the harrowing incident, in April 1933, Harriet Shaw died at age 59. Mr. Shaw did not recover from the pain of these deaths. On September 20th, 1937, he visited the graves of his wife and daughter at Greenmount Cemetery. Eventually, he kneeled on the ground, pulled out a pistol and shot himself in the head. The cemetery superintendent who had been watching Shaw pace in the cemetery cried out, but it was too late. Shaw left a note pinned to his clothing, stating simply “The act is my own.”
The Shaw home on 1809 N. Calvert Street is no longer standing, but nearby, The Church of St. Michael & All Angels is still there at 2013 St. Paul. The reverend who saved the surviving daughters from the 1921 boat accident is most likely Hunter Wyatt-Brown. He was known for weaving the “Lost Cause” ideology into his sermons, and Mrs. Shaw had been a member of Daughters of the Confederacy. Today, The Church of St. Michael & All Angels serves a multicultural congregation.
Although Wyatt-Brown left Maryland to become a bishop in Harrisburg Pennsylvania, his son Bertram Wyatt-Brown returned to Baltimore to study history at Johns Hopkins. In “The Society for U.S. Intellectual History” in 2015, Andrew Hartman wrote of Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s work: “Bert… zeroed in on the tragic and gothic South, as well as a host of men and women, gnarled by death, humiliation, loss, and anxieties. His books are populated by the chronically depressed, and by tortured writers on the brink of suicide, or novelists who were as much at war with the self as the region they called home.”
Recipe:
Grapefruit peel, cut into thin slices
salt
water
sugar
“After taking out the meat of the grape fruit cut rind in long pieces. Cover it with a strong salt water and let it soak 12 hours. Change water every 12 hours until rinds have soaked in strong brine 48 hours. Take rinds out of salt water and cover with fresh cold water and let it boil 10 minutes. Change water and let it boil another 10 minutes. Do this 6 times. Then take it out and weigh rinds and put a pound of sugar to every pound of fruit. Let cook slowly until the syrup, formed by putting sugar on rinds, has boiled away. Then take out piece by piece of grape fruit and roll in granulated sugar.“
Recipe from “The Tried and True Recipe Book,” Woman’s Guild, Church of St. Michael and All Angels, Baltimore
candied citrus peel chopped as a jelly roll cake filling
