“Gumbo Filet Powder is made of the tender young leaves of the sassafras,” wrote Jane Gilmor Howard in her 1873 cookbook Fifty Years in A Maryland Kitchen, “picked in the Spring, and dried carefully in the shade as you do herbs; powdered fine, bottled and corked tight. It is much used in New Orleans.”
This explanation was doing one better than Howard’s relative Mary Lloyd Tyson had done in her 1870 cookbook The Queen of the Kitchen. Tyson’s recipe, for “Gumbo Fillet,” didn’t presume that the ingredient needed any explaining. “Stir in 1 table-spoon of fillet, if it is fresh,” she wrote, “if not, put 2.”
Howard copied many recipes from The Queen of the Kitchen, but this was not one of them. Tyson’s recipe was pretty open-ended. She suggested readers add “as many oysters as you please” and advised that “Gumbo can be made of either ducks, pigeons, or cold turkey.” Jane Howard settled on a quart of oysters and a chicken.
Gumbo recipes containing okra are plentiful in Maryland cookbooks and recipe manuscripts dating back to the early 1800s, but Gumbo Filé is a bit of a specialty item. Elizabeth Ellicott Lea included an okra gumbo in her 1859 book Domestic Cookery, but as far as she knew or cared, sassafras was best used in a poultice (also containing bread crumbs and milk. If you have a flesh wound you might want to steer clear of Lea.) When Tyson presented “Gumbo Fillet” in Queen of the Kitchen, she commented “This is a favorite dish in the Southern States.”
This may be an example of the mystique of antebellum cooking and lifestyle that was implied in the recipes of Tyson and Howard, who both had plenty of Confederate ties. In 1898, Mrs. W. A. Fisher contributed a recipe each for gumbo with filé and okra for Recipes Old and New, a cookbook produced to benefit the Confederate Relief Bazaar.
While one theory of the origin of the name “gumbo” traces the word to West African words for okra, in the language of the Choctaw people, sassafras powder is called “kombo.” That raises too much confusion for me to write much more about gumbo at present.
Three recipes from a small envelope in the Frick Family Papers, Maryland Center for History and Culture, MS 2307, Box 10
What attracted me to this recipe was the name signed at the bottom of the page on which it was written.
“And so we are really going to have a tea room after all; it is to be a perfect love of a place, all little blue and white China teacups, and walls papered in cunning blue figures, and the name of this delicate place of amusement is going to be the ‘Dutch Tea Room.’ If you have happened to go to Baltimore, or visit Baltimore, or have friends who have, why you know all about the little tea room there that has the same name and has – been run by society girls for the past several years.” – The Times Dispatch, Richmond, VA, 1912
In 1907, Harriet Stanton Blatch met her friend Hettie Wright Graham for dinner. The destination was the famous Hoffman House hotel in New York. The “palace hotel” was known for fine food, expensive artwork, celebrity guests, and rye whiskey. Blatch and Graham took the elevator up to the fashionable rooftop garden dining area but were denied a table. The owner told Blatch that women diners were not allowed without a male escort. The policy was meant to protect women such as Blatch and Graham from having to dine near “objectionable” women. “When I have been annoyed it has been by men,” Blatch remarked. “I do not suppose you make any effort to keep objectionable men out.” She attempted to sue the hotel, and lost.
In the decades after the Civil War, a glamorous new era of restaurant dining was emerging. It wasn’t considered respectable for women to dine without male accompaniment in these places.
Clothing sale in the Dutch Tea Room, 1913
At the same time, women were spending more time outside of the home, whether it was working, shopping, or socializing. In “Ten Restaurants That Changed America”, author Paul Freedman wrote that “the period from 1890 to 1910 saw the proliferation of many types of middle-class restaurants, ranging from those featuring Chinese and other foreign cuisines to tearooms, coffee shops, cafeterias, and other inexpensive but orderly places to have lunch. These were not necessarily intended exclusively for women, but the fact that they did not serve alcohol made them seem appropriate places for unaccompanied women to dine.” (Note: Some accounts claim that it wasn’t always tea in those ladies’ teapots!) These types of establishments offered up “decorous but economical refuge, a midday oasis of sorts, where women who were shopping could dine and recuperate, or where women who worked in offices or stores could have a tranquil if more hurried lunch.”
A 1904 article in The Carlisle Pennsylvania Sentinal advised that opening a tea room was “a profitable occupation for women,” as long as the woman had “a business head and [knew] how to count up profit and loss” as well as experience “making all kinds of cakes in the best homemade way.”
Baltimore was the 6th-largest city in the United States around this time, and had a number of tea rooms. The most famous and enduring is the tea room in the Women’s Exchange. Department stores like Hutzler’s had a tea room inside the store. The Parkway Theater on North Avenue had a tea room which was “swarmed” with people waiting for the second showing of films each day. In segregated Baltimore there was also at least one Black-owned tea room – “The Little Gem” in Sandtown on Robert Street.
In 1914, author Julian Street came to Baltimore and visited the Women’s Exchange where he encountered a “great numbers of ladies sitting upon tall stools and eating at a lunch-counter.” He described the sight as “a somewhat curious spectacle, perhaps, but neither pleasing to the eye nor thrilling to the senses.”
1915 promotional cookbook showing “Dainty” food, Duke University
In the mid-19th century, American society began to develop the stereotype that women preferred different kinds of foods than men. Delmonico steak might be alright for men, but women require something “daintier” – things like cakes, fruit, salads, and egg dishes.
“The development of dining-out options for women was accompanied by a growing sense that women had their own preferences and could, at least in the company of other ladies, indulge them. The obvious advantage of all-female lunches was that women could partake of what they actually liked to eat.” – Ten Restaurants That Changed America
The tea rooms became a place not just for socializing but for politics including suffrage and prohibition. The Southern Tea Room at 206 Park Avenue hosted lectures on women’s suffrage and greeted suffragette Alice Paul with a reception in 1910.
Alice Paul visits the Southern Tea Room, Baltimore Sun, 1910
Marguerite Schertle was a tea room waitress for nearly 80 years. At age 92 she was profiled in “Maryland’s Vanishing Lives” where she shared the memories of tea room culture, where the customers were known by name as “Miss this and Miss that,” desserts like butterscotch and charlotte russe were still served, and where oftentimes sisters were employed side by side. Her own sister “Miss Anna” had worked with her at the Women’s Exchange until her death in 1992. The women had even married “look-alike” brothers and started families in adjacent bungalows in Hamilton. Schertle passed away in 2001 at 100 years old.
Before her half-century-long tenure at the Women’s Exchange, Schertle had worked for 20 years across the street at the Dutch Tea Room at 314 N. Charles.
The Dutch Tea Room had been opened in 1904 by Natalie Cole, who was, according to the Baltimore Sun, a “lady of social standing.” The popular tea room was even visited by President Wilson – almost. In 1913 he stopped by with his family but the place was too crowded so they went to the Rennert instead. Cole still got to serve her country in 1917, when the tea room baked 300 “extra fine” fruit cakes for soldiers at Camp Meade.
In 1918 Natalie Cole married William Wilson Galbreath, who is listed in some directories as a salesman of “porcelain products.” Hmm. Cole and her husband passed away in 1959 and 1952, respectively. I’m not sure when the Dutch Tea Room actually closed for business.
An October 1904 Baltimore Sun article claimed the great fire in February brought enterprising women to open lunch rooms
According to the Baltimore Sun obituary for Marguerite Schertle, when she’d worked at the Dutch Tea Room she had baked “Lady Baltimore, orange and Wellesley fudge cakes.”
I don’t have recipes for those cakes but I found a recipe in an undated, unpublished manuscript for a “Martha Washington Cake,” attributed to the Dutch Tea Room. The cake is actually a predecessor to Boston Creme Pie, with a custard filling and minus the chocolate topping. Although Boston Creme Pie has been sometimes called “Washington Pie” (or Cake), the Martha name is rarer – it’s typically known as a “Martha Washington Cream Pie.” The name is obviously more dainty and befitting a tea room.
Early 20th century menus suggest that both a cup of tea and a slice of cake would run about fifteen cents – $1.92 in today’s money. At that price, I could go for a tea room lunch. Myself and most dainty ladies would be quick to notice that it leaves more money and appetite for a burger and a beer for dinner. Male accompaniment optional, thanks.
Recipe:
Cake:
½ cup sugar
½ cup flour
3 eggs
Beat yolks then add the sugar. Fold in stiffly beaten whites, then gently fold in flour, stirring as little as possible. Bake in one cake tin. (A smaller taller cake might be preferable to the 9″ tin I used.)
Filling:
1 cup milk
1 egg
½ cup sugar
¼ cup flour
vanilla to taste
Scald the milk. Beat flour, sugar and egg in a separate bowl then mix in ¼ to ½ cup of the scalded milk. Return to pan and cook over medium heat until thickened. Cool thoroughly.
Split the cake vertically and spread filling in the middle. Top with powdered sugar.
