[Note: I wrote this in 2023. Krakus is now closed 😔. An alternative shop in Baltimore is At the Polish Table. – k] I love going to Krakus deli on Fleet street. As soon as you step inside you’re greeted with the smell of the various sausages, which hang behind the counter. A small selection…
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.