Dr. Edna Dorothy Meshke, like most of the contributors to “Maryland Cooking,” was a home economist. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: many of us have no idea how much we owe to Home Economics educators for creating, sharing, and fine-tuning classic recipes, and for raising the expectations of what a recipe can be.
Reinhold and Bertha Meshke immigrated from Germany to Minnesota in 1889. Their young cousin Fred made the journey in 1889 help the couple on their farm. Once established in America, Reinhold and Bertha had three daughters: Hazel, in 1899; Lucile, in 1904, and Edna, in 1907.
In 1930, at age 23, Edna was teaching at a public school while living in Faribault, Minnesota with her parents, who had retired from farming, and her sister Hazel, who was a nurse.
Edna earned a BS and PhD from University of Minnesota, and a MA from Columbia. These impressive credentials took Edna all around the country.
In 1938 she taught at the University at Buffalo. In 1943 she was at the University of Wisconsin. Some time in the 1940s, she led the Home Economics department at Butler University in Indiana. At some point, she worked at Pennsylvania State University. Throughout these years she continued to appear in Faribault city directories, leading me to believe that between school terms, she returned to live with her parents and sister at their home 711 1st Street.
I must admit I was pretty surprised to learn that Beef Stroganoff is actually Russian. I first met the creamy, comforting dish through our old pal Hamburger Helper. In community cookbooks, I’ve come across many recipes, most of which list a series of canned ingredients. I would’ve assumed Beef Stroganoff was some classic American ‘corporate shenanigans’, but I would be wrong!
The earliest recipe appears in an 1871 Russian cookbook, “The Gift to Young Housewives.” The decades encompassing the world wars enabled Beef Stroganoff to travel all around the globe, where it took on countless regional variations. In Nordic countries it’s made with sausage. In Japan it is served over white rice. In Brazil, it’s sometimes made with shrimp.
After WWII, when soldiers returned to the U.S. with a fondness for beef Stroganoff, the shortcuts like canned cream-of-mushroom soup made their way into the dish. Hamburger Helper introduced their version in 1971 – everything but the meat included in the box.
While most versions in the U.S. are generally made with a mushroom and sour cream sauce, my boyfriend grew up eating a version with tomatoes. I’ve come across a few tomato-containing Stroganoff recipes in community cookbooks and decided to give one a try.
With a rich yellow dough and an overabundance of dried fruits packed inside, Cornish Saffron Bread looks like the ultimate European Christmas treat. According to the Spitznas family of Frostburg Maryland, “in Cornwall, saffron bread is made on special occasions throughout the year, but in Western Maryland it became distinctly associated with Christmas.”
In 1955, Dr. James E. Spitznas (1893-1958) and his wife Elizabeth (1911-1994) (who were then living in Baltimore County) shared their recipe and story with Baltimore Sun food columnist Virginia Roeder. Roeder described Cornwall as the “land of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table,” but Dr. Spitznas pointed out that the tradition of Cornish saffron bread “probably preceded King Arthur by many centuries,” as the Phoenicians had been visiting Cornwall with packages of saffron for over 2000 years.
James & Elizabeth Spitznas making saffron bread together, 1955, Baltimore Sun
Dr. Spitznas recalled relatives from Cornwall mailing fragrant packages of dried saffron to Frostburg as the Christmas holiday approached.
Spitznas’ family had emigrated to the United States in 1874 from the village of Phillack, Cornwall. In the UK census, Dr. Spitznas’ grandparents Paul and Catherine Goldsworthy had been listed as “wire weavers and sieve makers.” In 1880 in Frostburg, Paul is listed as a laborer. It is possible that he came to do work relating to the mines of Western Maryland, like many other Cornish and Scottish settlers in Western Maryland throughout the 19th century.
Sarah Grace Goldsworthy became Sarah Spitznas and passed this recipe to James and his sister Sarah D. In 1948, Sarah D. and James’ wife Elizabeth measured and tested the old recipe to contribute it to the “Maryland Cooking” book.
The massive quantities called for in the “Maryland Cooking” recipe make enough bread to share with family, friends, and coworkers. I halved the recipe and still ended up with enough bread to freeze and eat for months to come. I think this will make an unusual French Toast, maybe good with a white wine sauce. As with all fruitcakes and fruit-containing Christmas breads, the dried fruits and nuts are variable by taste. I used currants, pineapple, and pecans. Don’t let raisins be the boss of you just because it’s Christmas!
Recipe:
Recipe from “Maryland Cooking,” 1948, Maryland Home Economics Association
Recipe note: after forming into loaves or buns, make sure to let rise again! The Spitznas used a bread pan but I didn’t have one so I rolled them into loaves.
Home Economics as a professional pursuit codified “women’s work” and amended school curricula, but it also opened doors for women professionally.
The name Virginia Roeder may ring a bell to longtime Baltimore recipe collectors. For 23 years she wrote for the “women’s pages” of the Baltimore Evening Sun, offering guidance on cooking and housekeeping. She penned three columns weekly, totaling around 3500 over the course of her career. The most enduring legacy of these columns is the “Fun with Food” and “Fun with Sea Food” cookbooks still serving many Baltimore kitchens today.
Richard Q. Yardley illustration, “Fun With Sea Food”,1960
In 1953, the Sun profiled Roeder, who was then hosting a Television show called “Nancy Troy’s Food Show.” (I am not sure why she assumed the “role” of Nancy Troy on the show.) The Sun reported that Roeder’s days began at 5:30 a.m., preparing breakfast for her husband and three children before heading to work at the William S. Baer School where she taught home economics to disabled children. After a day’s work she prepared dinner for her family and then “[sat] down with her husband to bring his company’s books up to date” for his wholesale distribution business.
In 1961 the Sun ran a highly illustrated tour of the Roeder’s home on Meadowwood Road, asking “how does an advisor to housewives manage her own home?” They described the decor in the “immaculate” home, complete with pool table, children’s playroom, “roomy pink kitchen,” and a corner desk in the master bedroom where Roeder typed her columns on Saturdays.
Basically, Roeder was Baltimore’s own Martha Stewart. (Roeder served on the board of a bank – she did not get involved in any insider trading, however.)
Born Virginia Voigt in Oklahoma, Roeder followed in her mother’s footsteps to pursue a career in education, earning a bachelor’s degree from the University of Science and Arts at Oklahoma (formerly Oklahoma College for Women). She soon ended up in Baltimore, where she made her mark on the school system, the food culture, and even in banking.
She’s been inducted to the Oklahoma College for Women hall of fame, where a biography of her achievements declares itself to be “simply a list of firsts.” In addition to earning a master’s and a doctoral degree at Johns Hopkins, Virginia Roeder became the “first female Deputy Superintendent Baltimore City Public Schools,” “first woman president Maryland Association of Secondary School Principals,” and “first woman board of directors Carrolton Bank.”
After retiring from education she continued to be a successful businesswoman in real estate and travel agencies.
Even while working towards all of these goals, Roeder maintained the refined image of an ideal mid-century “housewife.”
I got my copies of “Fun with Sea Food” from the Book Thing. The photo at the front shows a smiling Virginia Roeder. The author’s biography lists one accomplishment after another before declaring “Mrs. Roeder does all the cooking for her family.”
Two recipes for crab cakes are included, one of which has been marked “excellent” by my book’s previous owner. Other sections besides “The Delightful Crab” are adorably titled: “The Fascinating Fish,” “The Sophisticated Scallop,” “The Admirable Oyster.”
The recipe for Clam Fritters asks below the title, “Haven’t you ever made them?” I hadn’t so I took Virginia Roeder up on her challenge.
Recipe:
.5 Pint clams, minced
.75 Cups flour
.5 Tablespoons baking powder
1 teaspoon crab seasoning (adapted – Roeder used nutmeg and salt._
1 beaten egg
.5 Cups milk
2 Teaspoons grated onion
.5 Tablespoons melted butter
oil for frying
Sift dry ingredients together. Combine egg, milk, onion, butter and clams. Add to dry ingredients and stir until smooth. Drop batter by teaspoonfuls into hot oil, 350 degrees, and fry until golden brown on each side.
Recipe adapted from “Fun With Sea Food,” Virginia Roeder
I thought we’d take things back into the 20th century this week.
Among the “treasures” acquired in 1960 by the Maryland Department of the Enoch Pratt Free Library (”Maryland Room Acquires ‘Treasures’”, Baltimore Sun, November 1960) is a copy of a cookbook put out in 1948 by the Maryland Home Economics Association. Much like the “Secrets of Southern Maryland Cooking” book, it is written in many different hands with varying degrees of legibility.
Entitled “Maryland Cooking,” the book manages to pack 310 recipes. Three are for beaten biscuits, one is for crab cakes. “Stuffed Country Ham” is there too. The book is also notable in that it draws from regions of Maryland where less community or historic cookbooks had been produced. One recipe for “Cornish Saffron Bread,” is prefaced with the description that it was introduced to Frostburg by settlers from Cornwall in the mid 19th century. Ethel Grove from Washington County appropriately contributed a recipe for “Maple Bavarian Cream.” Each of Maryland’s counties had a committee gathering recipes for the book.
The cover illustration was done by Richard Q. Yardley, an editorial illustrator for the Sun, whose illustrations also adorn the Sun’s “Fun with Food” and “Fun with Sea Food” books from the 1960s.
The purpose of “Maryland Cooking” was to gain funds towards a Washington, DC Headquarters for the American Home Economics Association, and hopefully to provide scholarships to help “finance the education of girls who want to become home economists.”
After cooking schools had codified the domestic arts into a sort of ‘science for women,’ this type of education became offered to a younger audience through private schools or as part of public high school education. Newspaper articles marveled, sometimes condescendingly, at this new branch of education. In May 1913, a Sun reporter visited the cooking classes, which were taught at Western High School in Baltimore, and observed 120 pupils, “Baltimore’s fairest,” studying “ways to capture the heart of the male of the species.” The reporter declared that even a “hardened misogynist” would be charmed by the epicurean meals prepared by the students.
A follow up story in June remarked on the “awful fuss they make over a panful of pie.”
Home Economics at Iowa State College, 1942, Jack Delano, loc.gov
The housekeeping department, the June article continued, was conducted by Miss Helen Palen(1883-????), the “presiding genius” of a “dainty little flat” used to teach cleaning methods and laundry, although Palen noted that she did not expect the girls to have to do their own laundry.
Palen was still teaching housekeeping at the school in 1919, when the Sun reported on how the school was training girls “for future usefulness.”
Palen’s commitment to home economics education ran deep, and she appears in Johns Hopkins circulars as attending courses for teachers throughout the late 1910s. She served as the president of the Maryland Home Economics Association from 1918-1920.
That was nearly 30 years before the publication of “Maryland Cooking,” but it is her recipe for Beet Relish that I turned to to preserve my spring beets and cabbage.
Similar recipes appear in newspapers at the turn of the 20th century, but the European origins couldn’t be much more obvious. The beets (and in this case, a healthy amount of sugar…) sweeten up the horseradish and the cabbage mellows the whole thing out. The most similar condiment I could find online is called “tsvikly” in the Ukraine.
I naively thought that my backyard horseradish would be sufficient at first. When I dug it up and found it puny and pitiful, I had to go to a few stores to find horseradish that was unadulterated with oils or other additives. I ultimately found it in the seafood section.
I had forgotten the joy of a nice oniony roast beef sandwich with horseradish and greens. The relish also made a nice cheddar grilled cheese.
