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…
In 1916, Still Pond Methodist Church on the Eastern Shore produced a church cookbook entitled “The Eastern Shore Cookbook of Maryland Recipes.” You can see that once again a community cookbook made sure to put the state’s culinary fame front and center. And why not? Certainly the cuisine that was drawing tourists to Maryland’s luxurious…
This recipe for an alternate version of Baltimore Peach Cake** comes from “Black-Eyed Susan Country,” another popular Maryland fund-raising cookbook. This particular book, first printed in 1987, raised money for St. Agnes Hospital. Onetime St. Agnes Auxiliary president Mary Parga was a volunteer at the White House, and used her connections to compile the book’s notable “VIP”…
Update (2023): The recipe in this post was apparently invented by a woman named Connee Rauser Sheckler, who won a contest with it. It appeared in the “Cooking with Old Bay” cookbook under the name she gave it, “Old Bay Bianca Pizza.” I think I should make this dish again and share a few more…
A few weeks ago, while the snow was still coming down, with nowhere to go, I forced myself to do something that I haven’t done since the internet ostensibly put all of history at our fingertips: I called a stranger. The purpose of my call was to reach anyone involved in the cookbook “300 Years…