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.
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 hotel restaurants had bubbled up over time from humble regional kitchens.
So how did a “California” salad make its way into a book of Eastern Shore recipes? The recipe was contributed by Benjamin S. Haywood, a Methodist Reverend who visited the church at least once in his extensive travels.
Los Angeles Times, 1901
Born in Indiana in 1866, Haywood was living in Riverside, California by 1901. He traveled on missions to Puerto Rico and Mexico. According to a 1901 profile in the Los Angeles times, he used a novel approach to raise funds to hire a teacher for a school in Orizaba, Mexico. He contacted friends in the United States and encouraged them to quit smoking and to divert their savings to the school fund. A teacher was hired, and presumably Haywood’s friends gained some longevity.
I was drawn to this recipe because I love citrus salads in winter. Not only are many citrus fruits in-season at this time of year, but the vitamin C they contain gives me the illusion of enhanced immunity to whatever cold is going around at any given moment. Many of the greens and herbs that go well in these salads are also C-rich. I was unable to find a Bermuda onion, but red onion with navel orange and the tangy cooked dressing is a better match than you might think. A slice of avocado on top would be a nice addition.
This salad recipe got me thinking about ways that food culture was disseminated in an age before newspaper or internet recipes. Traveling clergy like Haywood could leave a lasting influence on the food shared among parishioners. With the publication of a cookbook, ideas could be spread further throughout the community and perhaps beyond – into the hands of readers who were looking for a taste of Maryland fare.
Recipe:
Oranges, Bermuda onions. Slice oranges and onions, placing one slice of onion between two of the oranges, in a sandwich form. Put this on lettuce leaves. Over all pour a cooked dressing.
Dressing:
Yolks of four eggs, beat very light, four tablespoons of sugar, one and one-half tablespoons of flour, one teaspoon of salt, one-half teaspoon of mustard, three-quarters cup of vinegar, one-quarter cup of water. Cook in a double boiler until thick and add one tablespoon of butter when taken from the fire. Mix with cream when used.
Recipes from “The Eastern Shore Cook Book of Maryland Recipes”, both contributed by B. S. Haywood
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” section. Barbara Mikulski’s crab-cake recipe makes an appearance, as well as [William Donald] “Schaefer’s Wafers.” The book also contains recipes from famed restaurants Tio Pepe, and the defunct Rudy’s 2900 and Chez Fernand. Recipes were also contributed by First Lady Nancy Reagan, and wife of then-Vice President George Bush.
This peach cake recipe was contributed by Mary Jo Krebs, an Arbutus resident who passed away in 2014. Both Mary Jo (born Gibson) and her husband Alcuin had Baltimore city roots going back many generations. Alcuin served in World War II before returning to Baltimore, graduating from Loyola and teaching in Baltimore public schools.
** So, no, this so-called “Baltimore Peach Cake” is not the yeast-risen, glazed cake we hear so much about. This was another beast entirely; a delicious, moist, cinnamony beast. By any other name it would taste just as sweet.
Recipe:
1 Tablespoon softened butter
1 Cup sugar
2.5 Cup flour
3 Teaspoon baking powder
1.5 Cup milk
.75 Cup sugar
2 Teaspoon cinnamon
5 peeled and sliced peach, fresh
2 Tablespoon melted butter
Preheat oven to 350°. Blend first five ingredients with electric mixer. Spread in greased and floured 13 x 9 inch inch cake pan and sprinkle with one half of cinnamon-sugar. Arrange peach slices in rows on top of the dough. Sprinkle with remaining cinnamon-sugar and drizzle with melted butter. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes.
Recipe adapted from Black-Eyed Susan Country: A Collection of Recipes by St. Agnes Hospital Auxiliary Committee
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 of the details given to me by Mrs. Sheckler!
After over a years worth of Old Line Plate recipes, I suppose it’s about time that Old Bay, that icon of Maryland food, makes an appearance. I fully admit that the reason behind this lazy recipe and post is partially because I’m gearing up for CSA season. Also, I feel like I have exhausted the topic of manors and hotels for the time being. I’m hoping to get back towards one of my original aims, which is to talk about the actual food once in awhile.
First of all, I feel it necessary to mention that Old Bay isn’t the only game in town and all of the other crab seasonings are worth a try. J.O. is the most notable as it also dates back to the mid-1940′s and is the one most often used by crab houses.
1959 crab house ad
These seasonings are the grand-child of “kitchen pepper,” customized blends of seasonings that varied from cook-to-cook but generally contained pepper, nutmeg, mace or white pepper, cinnamon and other ‘warm’ spices to the cook’s taste. Aside from the convenience of having the spice blend on-hand, the flavors in the pre-mixed seasoning were believed to benefit from mingling before use.
Mrs. B.C. Howard’s Kitchen Pepper, 50 Years in a Maryland Kitchen
Old Bay Seasoning, developed by German immigrant Gustav Brunn, was named after a famous steamship that operated between Baltimore and Norfolk, VA from 1840 to 1962. That whole tale is on Wikipedia so I won’t belabor it.
“[In 1939], crabs were so plentiful that bars in Baltimore, Maryland, offered them free[citation needed] and salty seasonings like Old Bay were created to encourage patrons to purchase more beverages.” – Wikipedia
Citation needed indeed. Many listings for the price of crabs in the newspapers, a 1938 crab conservation bill, and the knowledge that even a free crab has a cost when you factor in the cleanup all run counter to this fun fact.
1950 ad
But all is not lost. I have a new fun fact to replace it. In 1955, the purveyors of Old Bay, Baltimore Spice Company, were fined $500. Apparently it was illegal to ship salt and pepper mixed together across state lines.
I suppose that law was done away with shortly thereafter as Old Bay really took hold and became a household name in the 1960′s. The seasoning company was then, of course, purchased by McCormick in 1990.
This is one of the more modern recipes to ever appear on Old Line Plate. It comes from an early 1990s charity cookbook called “Developmental Delites.” This book raised money for the “The Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Neurodevelopmental Committee” at Franklin Square Hospital. Contributed by nurse Beth Ann Legambi, it is one of two recipes in the book featuring Old Bay.
Nowadays it’s pretty hard to turn your head one way or the other in Baltimore and not have some Old Bay shoved in your face. I tend to believe this is more on the part of advertisements and media than it is the actual people. While it is true that my mother has dutifully provided my California-residing-brother with this necessity, for most Marylanders, Old Bay is a fact of life more than a rabid obsession.
Recipe:
1 12″ pizza crust
2 Teaspoon olive oil
2 Cup picked crab meat, backfin
8 slice cooked and crumbled bacon
1 Tablespoon Old Bay [or other crab -ed] seasoning
1.5 Cup grated sharp Cheddar cheese
Preheat oven to 425°. Place crust onto a greased 12-inch pizza pan. Top with olive oil, crab meat, bacon, Old Bay seasoning and cheese. Bake on lowest oven rack at 425° for 20 minutes or until crust is golden.
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 of Black Cooking in St. Mary’s County.”
After some disconnected numbers and voice messages to the void, I reached Bertha Hunt, the daughter of Theresa Swales “Nannie” Young of Leonardtown, a woman with many recipes throughout the book. Theresa Young passed away in November 2012 at the age of 91.
“It’s in my kitchen right now,” Bertha declared when I asked about the cookbook.
Theresa Young was “a living saint” according to her daughter, with cooking skills that were “a gift from God.” Hunt emphasized her mother’s ability to cook completely from scratch with no assistance from conveniences like Jiffy cornbread mix – the likes of which “couldn’t touch” her mother’s cornbread. She recalled how they once grew sweet potatoes, kale, green beans, and “tomaters”, and how they always had “some form of dessert” with dinners – cake, raisin bread, her scratch-made peach cobbler. Her mother, she said, didn’t raise any “skinny twiggy daughters.”
Hunt continues to reside in Leonardtown. She has inherited her mother’s love (and skill) of cooking and spoke with pride about that fact.
Southern Maryland Stuffed Ham is still very popular in St. Mary’s County, and many of the longtime Black citizens there have not forgotten that this delicacy was born from the inventiveness and hardship of their ancestors. Four of the hundred-some-odd pages of “300 Years of Black Cooking in St. Mary’s County” are dedicated to stuffed ham, and Bertha Hunt mentioned it specifically, although her mother’s treasured recipe does not appear in the book. Hunt extolled the importance of fresh Amish market greens and McCormick spices in stuffed ham, which she still makes for special occasions with corned hams from B. K. Miller Meats in Clinton.
The heritage of stuffed ham is also discussed in an oral history interview located in the “SlackWater Archive” at St. Mary’s College of Maryland Archives. There, Theresa Young recorded that her grandmother was enslaved at the Blackistone Plantation at the current location of the St. Mary’s Academy. Theresa’s grandmother was a child growing up on a plantation while her mother tended the cows and worked the fields. They slept in a shack with a dirt floor and used oyster shells for eating utensils. Bertha Hunt mentioned to me that her great-grandmother had slept on beds made of potato sacks stuffed with autumn leaves. These stories have been passed down through generations, but the SlackWater oral histories are a fortunate document for posterity.
Many of the intertwined families of contributors to “300 Years of Black Cooking in St. Mary’s County” come up in those documents. My entry for Edith Dyson’s crab cakes explores another family connected with the cookbook.
“A chitterling dinner consists of chitterlings, potato salad, greens, bread, pie and beer or iced tea.” – Theresa Young in 300 Years of Black Cooking in St. Mary’s County
Food and race can be a fraught topic – one which I lack the experience or the authority to fully delve into in this website. The most visible facet is the stereotypes that have been used to deride African Americans’ (and other groups’) relationship with food from the outset of the United States. While trying to stay mindful of that context, my aim is to relay the joy and determination preserved within the spiral-bound covers of “300 Years of Black Cooking.” In the face of cruel stereotypes and food access injustice, cookbooks like this one not only preserved a neglected aspect of American heritage, but also sometimes served to fund – and feed – social causes.
“These culinary community advocates ‘bore little resemblance to the smiling, subservient, plump fictional mammies projected in advertising and on film, not only liberating Black women from the backs of buses but also from white kitchens’ as Patricia Turner Observed in Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies. And they took their recipes with them.
Black culinary workers championed their neighbors’ economic, social and political priorities during the civil rights movement the same way that the Colored Female’s Free Produce Society organized women in the 1830s to boycott products produced by slave labor and to ‘overthrow the economic power of slavery’” – Toni Tipton-Martin, The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks
“300 Years of Black Cooking in St. Mary’s County” was put together in 1975 by “Citizens for Progress,” a group working to address poverty by tackling issues such as welfare rights, housing, and financial services. The book was intended to help fund a new community center. Community cookbooks were of course very popular at the time but this one is special.
Rather than representing members of a particular organization, church parish, school, or social club, the recipes in “300 Years” were gathered from an assortment of families in the region.
The introduction includes a brief explanation of the African origins of Southern Maryland food. Although “soul food” had been receiving some cultural recognition around the time of the book’s publication, Maryland then as now was caught in a nether region of questioned Southern identity. When people’s foodways become a commodity to rank, authenticate, and exploit, real people’s experiences fall by the wayside. “300 Years” is one of the only books documenting the history of Black cooking in Maryland (outside of the recipes adopted by and subsequently credited to white cooks.)
I’m glad I picked up the phone and spoke to a person, rather than relying on what sparse documentation of this book is available on the internet. Bertha Hunt, daughter of just one of the many people who contributed to this book, so kindly and spiritedly demonstrated the importance of these unique Maryland food traditions.
There is a modern misconception about “folkways”: that the groups who created and perpetuated these cultures of food, music, and craftsmanship didn’t recognize their value. It may seem that if it weren’t for prescient cultural saviors -Alan Lomax types (nothing against Lomax!)- that people would carelessly let their treasures slip away into obscurity with the changing times. This is, of course, projection. It is society at large which did not place a value on the many cultural treasures of the poor, the marginalized, the ‘folks.’ Issues with literacy, material hardship and resources may have made deliberate preservation a daunting undertaking, but there has never been a shortage of people – especially women- who recognized the significance of their contributions, even in the face of a society that didn’t.
