Somewhere in the history of nearly every church, there was a cookbook.
The authors usually intended to raise money for their church or auxiliary group, but from my vantage point, their efforts would amount to more than just the funds they generated. Church cookbooks are documents of social networks and culinary trends. Sometimes they even contain illustrations, i.e. folk art. They offer a deeper connection to a place in time.
The 1942 “Favorite Recipes of the Woman’s Society of Christian Service” of Saint Mark’s Methodist Church in Forest Park is a fine specimen. It appears to be printed on a ditto machine. The recipes are mostly for desserts, doughnuts and gelatin-based fruit salads, but there are some dinner options, including local favorite Sour Beef, and three chili recipes (at a time when they were not so common in Maryland cookbooks). Best of all, the book includes the full names of many recipe contributors, enabling me to do a little research on the people behind the recipes.
Yet another quick recipe and quick post… I have some fun stuff in the works behind-the-scenes so please bear with me. I picked up the 1994 “Brentwood Foursquare Gospel Church” cookbook because I don’t do very many recipes from P.G. County even though I grew up there.
The recipe was contributed by Marjorie Elton Orewiler. Marjorie and her husband served as pastors of the Foursquare Gospel Church in Maryland, Maine, Pennsylvania and her home state of Ohio, where they returned upon retiring.
The Orewilers in the News-Journal, Mansfield, Ohio, 1997
I was unfamiliar with the “Foursquare Gospel” denomination, and researching it sent me down a rabbit-hole of history that is hard to summarize here.
The church was founded in 1923 by the charismatic and controversial Aimee Semple McPherson, a Canadian-American evangelist who pioneered the use of radio to reach followers. She founded one of the first “megachurches” in Los Angeles, the Angelus Temple, where she attracted a large following with her flamboyant sermons.
In one famous sermon entitled “Arrested for Speeding,” she took inspiration from the experience of being pulled over. She dressed in a police uniform and appeared on stage revving a motorcycle and warned followers about “speeding to hell.”
While she decried the godlessness of theater and film, she sought to make her church as entertaining an experience as those mediums.
One of McPherson’s critics was Baltimore’s H.L. Mencken, who of course had little praise for McPherson’s ideology or for her support of the anti-evolution side of the Scopes trial.
He ended up coming to her defense during a media circus in which she was accused of staging her own kidnapping in 1926. It seems that Mencken detested the growing culture of Hollywood spectacle as much as he detested anti-science crusaders.
The trial in which McPherson stood accused of the fraud, wrote Mencken, “was an orgy typical of the half-fabulous California courts. The very officers of justice denounced her riotously in the Hearst papers while it was in progress….”
The Foursquare Church continued to flourish after McPhersons death in 1944. Having been racially integrated under McPherson’s leadership, the church continues to have a diverse membership. The Brentwood cookbook includes standard church cookbook recipes like Scripture Cake, plus some surprises like bagels and Nigerian Jollof Rice.
I took the easy way out with this tasty concoction and I can’t say I regretted it… With low energy and hostile weather going on, I’d eat something like this every night of February if I could.
Recipe:
1 Lb beef, ground
1 Cup chopped onion
2 15-oz cans pork & beans
1 can butter lima beans, drained
1 Cup tomato catsup
1 Tablespoon liquid smoke
3 Tablespoon white vinegar
1 dash pepper
.5 Lb bacon, cut into small pieces
1 can kidney beans, drained
.25 Cup packed brown sugar
1 Teaspoon salt*
Brown ground beef in skillet; drain off fat and put beef in large crock pot. Brown bacon and onions; drain off fat. Add bacon, onions and remaining ingredients to crock pot. Mix well. Cover and cook on low 4 to 9 hours.Recipe may be cut in half for small crock pot.
Recipe from “B. F. G. C. Cooks”
* As much as I love salt, I’m gonna have to disagree with Marjorie on this one. With all the canned things and ketchup and bacon? I assure you it was fine without.
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
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.
Cole Slaw or Cold Slaw? I think I’ve personally always called it coleslaw, but I’m not even sure. And we are talking about a food that I love.
Cole/d slaw, it turns out, is one of those words that has been adapted to its meaning ala “scrapple” or “gingerbread”. In Dutch ‘koolsla’ means cabbage salad.
But this is American food we’re talking about and we don’t let linguistics quell our appetites.
In turn, “cold slaw” christened its less-famous cousin “hot slaw.”
I’ve got a handful of hot slaw recipes containing anything from sour cream to bacon fat. “Queen of the Kitchen” Mary Lloyd Tyson simply instructs the reader to heat up some cold slaw. Peasant of the Kitchen Old Line Plate is going to go ahead and tell you not to do that.
If you’ve enjoyed any “kil’t kale” or greens wilted with dressing you will understand why. Something about subduing those cruciferous vegetables with a splash of grease and acid brings out a wonderful sweetness.
I used a recipe from an 1897 church cookbook from Montgomery County, “The Up To Date Cook Book of tested recipes.” The book benefited St. John’s Church, and many of the recipes presumably came from its congregation. Also included are some recipes from a contemporary church cookbook from Kenton Ohio, entitled “The Kenton Cook Book.”
The Hot Slaw recipe comes directly from Mrs. Spencer Watkins, one of the compilers of “The Up-To-Date Cook Book.”
When I found this Montgomery county cookbook I was excited to see a different side of Maryland. So many Maryland cookbook authors of the 1800s (excepting Elizabeth Ellicott Lea, who also resided in Montgomery County) tend to be so Southern seeming and have plantation upbringings and Confederate leanings to show for it. “The Up-To-Date Cook Book” might be different. It has a page of Cuban recipes!
Mrs. Spencer Watkins, I soon learned, was from the Potomac area of Maryland, where she was born Maria Brooke in 1844.
Aside from the “The Up-To-Date Cook Book”, the other account of Mrs. Watkins’ past proved to me that she was not so unlike those other Confederate cookbook authors after all.
“She had been reared in Southern society, and believed in slavery as a divine institution. She was fully convinced that all this fuss and war, this loss and suffering, and this excitement, was due to the wild imaginings, perverse distractions, and evil intent of Northern Yankees. She, like most young ladies in the South, not only believed all this and many more awful things about the Yankees and their cause, but she believed in asserting herself and in defending her opinions and her sacred rights.” –
“
The First Maine heavy artillery”, 1862-1865 by Horace Shaw
According to this account, Maria Brooke, whose father’s Potomac plantation “had suffered severe loss by his slaves taking sudden leave,” was a fearless, dashing horseback rider, and skilled with a rifle. She rebuffed some (Pennsylvania) “Dutch” troops with her sassy attitude before a regiment from Maine arrived. She befriended these men, first enjoying their music and horses, then attending Sunday service with the regiment, and befriending their wives.
The First Maine Band in front of the Brooke residence. Maria was a lover of music and befriended the soldiers. (The First Maine heavy artillery, 1862-1865)
Young Maria Brooke’s allegiances changed. The story concludes:
“Rollicking romp on foot or horseback among her young companions, delightful entertainer of friends, supercilious scorner of whomsoever she disliked, tender-hearted nurse to the sick, motherly woman to the helpless and needy, and spiteful tormentor to the shiftless; attracting suitors, yet spurning softness and repelling audacity in any. She is a loyal Unionist now. She married Mr. Spencer Watkins, and at this writing is still living in Washington. Like the rest of us, time has been speeding her along.”
Maria Brooke became Mrs. Spencer Watkins around 1860. He passed away in 1904. They had at least four children, two of which survived to adulthood. She died in 1907, but not before contributing nearly forty recipes to “The Up-To-Date Cookbook.”
Recipe:
1 small head of cabbage
2 eggs
1 Tablespoon butter
3 Tablespoons cream
1 Tablespoon sugar
.5 Teaspoon mustard powder
Pinch cayenne pepper
minced onion
parsley
2 Tablespoons vinegar
Whisk together eggs, cream, butter, sugar, mustard, pepper and onion over low heat or in double boiler. Slowly whisk in vinegar. Cook until thickened and add parsley. Stir in chopped cabbage, cooking just until heated (do not let the eggs cook). Serve immediately.
