Tag: christmas

Cornish Saffron Bread

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With a rich yellow dough and an overabundance of dried fruits packed inside, Cornish Saffron Bread looks like the ultimate European Christmas treat. According to the Spitznas family of Frostburg Maryland, “in Cornwall, saffron bread is made on special occasions throughout the year, but in Western Maryland it became distinctly associated with Christmas.”

In 1955, Dr. James E. Spitznas (1893-1958) and his wife Elizabeth (1911-1994) (who were then living in Baltimore County) shared their recipe and story with Baltimore Sun food columnist Virginia Roeder. Roeder described Cornwall as the “land of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table,” but Dr. Spitznas pointed out that the tradition of Cornish saffron bread “probably preceded King Arthur by many centuries,” as the Phoenicians had been visiting Cornwall with packages of saffron for over 2000 years.

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James & Elizabeth Spitznas making saffron bread together, 1955, Baltimore Sun

Dr. Spitznas recalled relatives from Cornwall mailing fragrant packages of dried saffron to Frostburg as the Christmas holiday approached.

Spitznas’ family had emigrated to the United States in 1874 from the village of Phillack, Cornwall. In the UK census, Dr. Spitznas’ grandparents Paul and Catherine Goldsworthy had been listed as “wire weavers and sieve makers.” In 1880 in Frostburg, Paul is listed as a laborer. It is possible that he came to do work relating to the mines of Western Maryland, like many other Cornish and Scottish settlers in Western Maryland throughout the 19th century.

Sarah Grace Goldsworthy became Sarah Spitznas and passed this recipe to James and his sister Sarah D. In 1948, Sarah D. and James’ wife Elizabeth measured and tested the old recipe to contribute it to the “Maryland Cooking” book.

The massive quantities called for in the “Maryland Cooking” recipe make enough bread to share with family, friends, and coworkers. I halved the recipe and still ended up with enough bread to freeze and eat for months to come. I think this will make an unusual French Toast, maybe good with a white wine sauce. As with all fruitcakes and fruit-containing Christmas breads, the dried fruits and nuts are variable by taste. I used currants, pineapple, and pecans. Don’t let raisins be the boss of you just because it’s Christmas!

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Recipe:

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Recipe from “Maryland Cooking,” 1948, Maryland Home Economics Association

Recipe note: after forming into loaves or buns, make sure to let rise again! The Spitznas used a bread pan but I didn’t have one so I rolled them into loaves.

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Swedish Salad

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With parts of Scandinavia so far north that the dark days of winter are endless, its no wonder that the region has rich December holiday traditions. While some of the old Norse Yule symbology made its way into Christmas around the world, other customs remain specific and regional.

St. Lucia Day is a particularly iconic Swedish holiday that commences the Christmas season. A friend of mine, Baltimore performer Lucia Treasure, recently made a facebook post explaining the holiday:

“A pre-Christian Swedish tradition, it is held on December 13th, or the solstice in the old calendar. The meaning of Lucia is light, and so the Swedish celebrate a folk hero who brought food to the poor in the winter as the small point of light on the darkest day of the year. Later, it was co-opted by Christians as their religion spread into the north, and Lucia was martyred in story so they could keep their traditions. Just as Christmas, originally a celebration of winter solstice, was also enfolded into a celebration of the birth of Jesus.”

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Baltimore Sun, 1963

From there, the season continues with an array of foods and customs. I recently attended a party and tried some glögg & saffron buns, plus an array of more familiar-to-me favorites like gingerbread cookies (“pepparkakor”) and gravlax.

I searched my recipe database for ‘Swedish’ to come up with some options of what to bring. There are Swedish meatballs of course, but where’s the excitement in that?; “Swedish Cookies” from Somerset County; “Swedish Roll,” from 1906 (which was basically a Swiss roll filled with currants); or a “Swedish Salad” recipe pasted into Olivia Conkling’s personal recipe book from the Maryland Historical Society special collections.

This option intrigued me but I didn’t have time to make it to MDHS so I searched some old newspapers. Conkling’s books were full of clippings from all kinds of sources. She was a granddaughter of one of the owners of the famous Kirk Silver company. She married William Higgins Conkling of Davenport, OH, a bank president who had started his career in business as a coffee importer.

The cookbook may have also been handled or contributed to by their daughter Mary Olivia Conkling Ladd (1874-1953). The items clipped into these books are varied and interesting and I’ll explore them in greater depth later.

Anyway… so that is my tenuous connection to this recipe, which was printed in a multitude of regional newspapers in the early 1890s. The ingredient quantities are very vague, but I assumed this would be some muddled inauthentic 19th-century recipe anyway so I followed my instinct.

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A more elaborate Swedish Salad recipe in the Wisconsin Post-Crescent, 1927

When I brought the salad to the party I was told that it turned out to be pretty authentic and incidentally something enjoyed around Christmastime.

I’ve noticed that some dishes which are enjoyed in the “old world” sometimes become more holiday-associated in America. Holidays are after all a time of family and heritage and seeking out just the right ingredients.

One Swedish custom I will be passing up on this Christmas is the ramped-up cleaning that, according to the Baltimore Sun in 1934, was customary. Every copper utensil “must glisten like gold,” curtains and linens must be cleaned, and chair seats wiped down, wrote Worthington Holiday. “There is a superstition that departed ones return to inspect the houses on Christmas Eve and woe be unto the housewife who is careless and does not please them.”

Dearly departed: I love you and miss you, but you’ll have to excuse the pet hair. God Jul!

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Recipe:

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Unsurpassed Doughnuts, Elizabeth Staats

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Elizabeth Staats (1852-1933, Kent County) collected recipes – hundreds of them. 

The collection started with a scrapbook Staats inherited from her mother Mary Griffith (1829-1892), whose original book contains handwritten recipes for food as well as things like soap and a “cure for cholera.” Staats finished that book before compiling the second book of over 300 recipes. (The two books are now housed at the Maryland Historical Society.) She was partial to cakes and desserts, although she occasionally clipped recipes for things like “Cheese Fondu”, scrapple, or deviled crabs. Many of the recipes are crossed out, “no good” written beside them, or with newer scraps pasted right over the old handwritten recipes.

There’s a social register’s worth of sweets: “Fannie Goodall’s” Chocolate Cake; “Alice Drekas’” Boiled Icing; “Laura Townsend’s” Crullers. 

But Staats didn’t just rely on her extended personal network for recipe ideas – she had access to newspapers and multiple magazines like “The Country Gentleman,” “Ladies’ Home Journal,” and “Good Housekeeping.”

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Good Housekeeping Volume 35, 1902

This recipe for “Unsurpassed Doughnuts” came from the latter. Good Housekeeping was founded in 1885 by publisher Clark W. Bryan with a mission to “perpetuate perfection as may be obtained in the household.” The new magazine combined that movement towards “domestic science” with fiction, poetry, and even some puzzles. 

Paging through Staats’ scrapbooks, I could easily envision a woman spending leisurely afternoons poring over the magazine, clipping out good things she would like to eat.

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Rebus, Good Housekeeping Volume 35, 1902

Below her transcription of the doughnut recipe, Staats wrote “”Fine. Used this winter 1903.” Unlike so many others in the scrapbooks, this recipe has been tried –  and approved. It had been submitted to Good Housekeeping my a Mrs. N.W. (Charlotte) Northrup, of Grand Rapids MI. 

As is so often the case, the yeast component is basically unknowable. Its hard to understand how a recipe could even have meaning with such a huge variable. Nevertheless, I used a few teaspoons of dry yeast, and set the ingredients out to ferment overnight as instructed.

I made these doughnuts on the day of the Mayor’s Annual Christmas Parade. We cooked them up in my cousins’ Medfield kitchen and shared them with neighbors. They were pretty great. So was the parade, as usual.

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Recipe:

“1 cup sugar, 3 cups milk, 1 cup yeast, make these into a sponge and let stand overnight; in the morning add 1 cup sugar, ½ cup butter, 3 eggs, ½ nutmeg, ½ tea-spoon soda, stir in flour until stiff.Let rise again, then mix stiff enough to roll, and cut into shape desired. Let rise again until light, then fry.Fine. Used this winter 1903To save grease in frying doughnuts; put ½ teaspoonfull of ginger in grease when hot.”

Recipe from Maryland Historical Society MS 1765, “Mary Black Griffith Cookbook”, via Good Gousekeeping Volume 35, 1902

Interpretation, as I recall it:

  • 2 Cups sugar
  • 3 Cups milk (room temperature)
  • 4.5 teaspoons dry yeast
  • .5 Cup butter, soft
  • .5 tsp salt
  • 3 eggs
  • .5 tsp nutmeg
  • .5 Teaspoons baking soda
  • flour (6-8 cups)

Combine 1 cup of sugar with the milk and yeast; let stand over night. In the morning add the other cup of sugar, then beat in eggs one by one. Beat in butter plus the other ingredients. Gradually add flour until dough starts to become smooth and form a ball that pulls away from the sides of mixer or bowl. Knead for about a minute then leave to rise for about 2 hours.
Beat down and roll to about ½” thickness, cut into desired shapes and let rise another 1-2 hours – until puffing up.
Fry in hot vegetable oil until golden brown – about 1-2 minutes each side.
Roll in sugar mixed with cinnamon and nutmeg. Accept compliments graciously.

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Amalgamated Maryland Eggnog

“Christmas comes but once a year, when eggnog takes the place of beer.” – 1918

These days, Christmastime can feel tainted with greed; shopping and spending, forging memories with limited edition Coke cans, thoughtless gifts and waste. There was a time, over a century ago, when things were more simple and pure. Back in those days, before the black friday sales or even department store extravaganzas, the Christmas holidays were more grounded, centered in the true reason for the season… getting #$@%*! up.

Make no mistake – our agrarian ancestors indeed worked their fingers to the bone day in day out for the most of the year. But when winter rolled around, harvests were put up, hogs killed and cured, one of the primary chores to attend to was… partying. Families would travel or host visitors; when possible, food was shared in all directions; spirits were consumed, often to excess. The large quantities called for in old eggnog recipes hearken to a time when a huge batch was made in late November, to serve to guests throughout the season.

This annual cycle remained in the social DNA even as the nature of work changed, and more and more people flocked to cities and manned machines year round (or sat in offices and collected on the work of others.) In this environment, things could get a little… chaotic.

January 1, 1838, Baltimore Sun

Especially in the rough-and-tumble environment of late 1800s Baltimore, the winter holidays correlated with a time of increased accidents, petty crimes, and some not so petty crimes. We’ll get the unpleasantness out of the way and start with the latter – eggnog poisonings.

I found several incidents of murder or drugging by eggnog. The ubiquitous holiday beverage with its potent combination of liquors must have been a most tempting vehicle for sinister motives in December.

More innocuously, eggnog was generally associated with the type of rowdiness that drew the finger-wagging of the temperance movement and the cautioning of elders. In 1890, two Baltimore men, aged 19 and 21, successfully used “egg-nogg” as a defense when they went to trial for stealing a horse and buggy on a lark.

1853

Each year, news editorials appeared, admonishing would-be eggnog hellions to stop the insanity. In 1905 a Baptist reverend took to the pages of the Afro-American to decry the debauchery, firecrackers and revealing clothing associated with Christmas revelry. Many young men, he warned, have their “lives blotted out” on this one day, and many young women “start to hell.”

“The enjoyments of the Christmas festival were accompanied, as usual, with the usual number of accidents, some resulting from the careless use of firearms, whilst others may perhaps be attributed to the too free use of “egg-nogg and apple toddy.” – Baltimore Sun, 1868

During the holiday season, temperance advocates gladly took on the title of “Anti Egg-Nog Movement” when holding meetings.

Still, the popularity of eggnog continued right on up to -and through- Prohibition. In 1921, the Sun declared that “1921 eggnog is properly seasoned with real Jamaica rum, bootlegged at $8 a quart.”

I have over 30 eggnog recipes in my database. Curious to compare differences, I normalized some of the recipes to a 12-egg standard and compared liquor ratios. Findings? The 50’s were a boozy time. The party seems to be in Howard county.

Most Maryland recipes call for a combination of brandy and either rum or bourbon. A few use all of the above. According to “Forgotten Maryland Cocktails”, the combination of liquors such as cognac, Jamaican rum, and Madeira are typical of a “port city” eggnog, which makes sense. Peach brandy was a very popular addition as well.

Some recipes use cream, some use milk, while others use both. Egg whites, no whites, top the nog with beaten whites? To nutmeg or not to nutmeg?

I couldn’t decide which recipe to try. Compromise: all of them. I calculated an average amount of liquors, cream and milk. I decided to wing it with the whites and ultimately left them out. I also opted to leave out ‘unusual’ inclusions such as cloves or evaporated milk. The result is what I’ll call Amalgamated Maryland eggnog.

I’ll end this post with commentary from one of eggnog’s rare printed defenses. In 1910 the Annapolis Capital paper quipped: “With eggs at 42 cents per dozen the Mint Julep Association is glad it does not belong to the Eggnog Clan.” The Baltimore Sun indignantly reprinted the comment with the reply: “Clan, sister? It is a hierarchy, a universal brotherhood, a winged seraband that measures its membership by the millions and counts its kingdoms by the stars.”

Recipe:
  • 12 eggs, separated
  • 3 pints cream
  • 2 pints milk
  • 1.25 pints brandy (peach if you can find it, apple is the likely option)
  • .5 pints Jamaican rum
  • .5 pints Bourbon
  • 9 oz sugar (or to taste)
  • nutmeg (optional)
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract (optional)

Beat eggs until smooth and yellow. Gradually beat in sugar, followed by liquors, vanilla (if using) and finish with milk and cream. Optional: top with beaten egg whites or fold them in last. Top with nutmeg if desired.

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