Recipe seekers: For a better Smearcase cheesecake recipe post, click here! While many Baltimoreans get excitable about the annual Peach Cake tradition, Peach Cake’s Plain Jane cousin Smearcase gets somewhat overlooked. I do mean that literally. With a similar German origin to Peach Cake, Smearcase cake can often be found in the same bakery cases,…
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…
Aside from the delicious and intoxicating experiment with Cherry Bounce, I’ve neglected to incorporate cherry desserts into this blog. The reason is pretty obvious – cherries rarely outlast the snacking phase. The 1921 “Report of the Maryland Agricultural Society” made note that “Cherries have never been considered as one of the money makers for Maryland,” and…
“If alum is something to be proud of why conceal it on the label in type as small as the law permits?” – Alum in Baking Powder, 1927, Royal Baking Powder Company “Today, the Royal Company is manufacturing and selling a phosphate type of powder such as they condemned and classed as a mineral…
I found this rare little church cookbook at the Kelmscott Bookshop a few months ago. It’s got a bunch of old photographs and a brief history of a town in Maryland right on the Pennsylvania border, Bentley Springs. “On October 4, 1837, the Baltimore and Susquehanna Railroad obtained a right-of-way from William Dorsey and leveled…