When I created the map of the Baltimore Sun’s recipe contest winners, I thought a lot about what the city looked like in 1911, when the contests were run. I looked at old maps, and imagined life on the city’s outskirts. The 1898 Bromley Atlas showed a sprinkling of buildings out in the Northeast. By…
“We have made several notices of various improvements and inventions for cooking and heating by gas,” read an article in the Baltimore Sun in 1854, “and we have no doubt the result will eventually prove important to the world.” At a fair in Philadelphia, a gas stove made by Andrew Mayer had been used to…
A reader once contacted me, asking “why there were so many recipes labeled with Maryland?” She included an example in her email – a recipe for “Maryland Cream Waffles.” I hadn’t heard of Maryland Cream Waffles before, so I went to my database. The first thing I found was a recipe in Mrs. B. C….
After successfully growing citron melons this summer, I found that I had even more melons than required to make Agnes Poist’s Old-Fashioned Citron Preserve.
I used the extra melons to make Mrs. Benjamin Chew Howard’s recipe for citron pickles, seasoned with vinegar, brown sugar, cinnamon, allspice, and cloves. Howard’s recipe yielded a tasty syrupy concoction that might be good for cocktails or other creative uses, but I was a bit at a loss for what to do with the pickled citron melon flesh. Snacking? Fans of pickled watermelon rind might say so, but I don’t tend to snack on something like this. I worried about it rotting in the fridge.
Louisville Kentucky Courier-Journal, 1953
I decided to put the “citron” to the test, as I had intended to do with Poist’s preserve. That recipe preserved the melon in a sugar syrup flavored with citrus peel. It could allegedly be used in cakes, like actual citron. Unfortunately, it molded before I got around to trying to bake with it.
What if I baked a cake with pickled citron? The idea sounded a little weird but I thought I’d try it anyway, to see just how well the citron melon could live up to its namesake.
For 36 years, columnist and photographer Brice Stump wrote about life on the Eastern Shore. In his columns, he explored its history – including the Civil War, and pondered the petty tribulations of modern life.
On one topic in particular, Stump was passionate: White Hayman Sweet Potatoes. Having been raised on a farm, Stump admitted they aren’t easy to grow. But of their flavor, he sang the praises.
“Unlike the familiar orange-fleshed sweet potatoes that required marshmallows, brown sugar and lots of butter to enhance their nutty flavor, the Hayman tickles the palate with a natural, delicately sweet taste and heavenly texture,” Stump wrote in the Salisbury Daily Times in 1999. In that article, he interviewed Rev. Sally Bowen, a descendent of Daniel Hayman, the ship captain purported to have brought the potatoes from North Carolina to Maryland in the 1850s.
Although stories trace White Haymans to North Carolina, nary a trace of them can be found there now. White Haymans are a specialty of the Eastern Shore, “raised only for Shore consumers,” wrote Stump.
Eight years later he bemoaned the proliferation of O’Henrys appearing on the market, ironically “coming out of the Carolinas, apparently.” These pretenders were giving Haymans a bad name. An authenticity test was recommended: “If you put pressure down on your thumb and draw it over the face of a Hayman, it will ‘skin’ easily, whereas the O’Henry wont.”
If the difference is so stark, that casts a lot of doubt on my last attempt at a white sweet potato pie. This time around, my mom acquired some Haymans from Whiteraven’s Nest in Chincoteague, Virginia – along with several other varieties of sweet potato. So I used a blend. She was warned to cure them several weeks, in a warm and dry place, or else risk defeating the point of even tasting them.