“Through the years, Maryland whiskey has become almost as renowned as Maryland fried chicken.” – Maryland: A Guide to the Old Line State, Writers’ Program of the Works Progress Administration, 1940
In July 1945, war correspondent Ollie Stewart wrote to the Afro American of the frenzied scene in Berlin as American soldiers had raided Hitler’s “medal room” for souvenirs while the Russians looked on, laughing. “We must have looked silly as hell,” the journalist remarked.
Stewart left Berlin for Paris, where he’d just missed a banquet for the leaders of the Red Cross. The seven-course feast was served by an all-black staff – a new and novel experience for the Frenchmen. Although Stewart was at a loss to recall the full menu, owing to “so much French in the darn thing,” one dish stood out as “the big noise”: “Poulet frit Maryland.”
According to Stewart, the dish set a new standard for Parisian chefs. Some of them asked him “where is this place, Maryland?” The Afro-American shared the anecdote under the headline: “Maryland Gains Fame.”
Of all of the forgotten Maryland recipes, Maryland Fried Chicken may be the most misunderstood. It may even be impossible to understand. Since its nebulous inception, there has been little agreement on just what constitutes “Maryland Fried Chicken,” also known as “Fried Chicken, Maryland Style,” or sometimes “Chicken a la Maryland.” See? There isn’t even agreement on what to call it.
In 1894, Mrs. Charles H. Gibson, like Miss. Mary Lloyd Tyson and Mrs. Benjamin Chew Howard before her, got in on the trend of releasing a cookbook to share and boast her renowned hostessing and housekeeping skills. Like those other books “Mrs. Charles H. Gibson’s Maryland and Virginia Cookbook” capitalized on the fame of Chesapeake cooking.
“In placing my book before the public I feel that I have a right to claim a like indulgence to those who, before me, have given to the world the benefit of their experience, and I feel confident that my “Cook Book,” being the result of an experience of twenty years, will meet with a just reward.“ – Preface, “Mrs. Charles H. Gibson’s Maryland and Virginia Cookbook”
Mrs. Charles H. Gibson was born Marietta Fauntleroy Powell in 1838 in Middleburg, Virginia. According to a profile in “The Midland Monthly,” she was educated in Richmond “where she was a great belle.” Describing her as a renowned housekeeper and hostess, the 1896 profile gushes that Mrs. Gibson had written “one of the best cook books extant.”
“The Midland Monthly,” 1896
Around 1858, Marietta married Richard Carmichael Hollyday and moved to his manor in Talbot County, an estate known as Ratcliffe. Hollyday had inherited the mansion from his father Henry, the second son of the senior Henry Hollyday, who had built the Georgian home around 1749 on a tract of land originally bequeathed to Robert Morris by Oliver or Richard Cromwell.
Ratcliffe Manor sits on the Tred Avon River not far from Easton. Although books about colonial architecture always mention that the house is not particularly large, they go on to fawn over its beauty. Swepson Earle wrote in “Maryland’s Colonial Eastern Shore”: “‘Ratcliffe Manor House’ is more distinguished in appearance than the majority of homes built at the same period. The rooms are capacious, the ceilings high, and the quaintly carved woodwork delights the connoisseur of the colonial.”
“Colonial Mansions of Maryland and Delaware” by John Martin Hammond (1914) describes “an air of comfort and good taste”, with a living room opening to a terraced garden. “To the left of the front door as you enter, is a little office, or study, wherein the master of the plantation in the old days interviewed his overseer and attended to the many small details of management of the place.”
We are fortunate to have a rare alternative view into life at Ratcliffe Manor care of William Green, who had been enslaved at a neighboring farm, escaped to freedom in 1840 and wrote a memoir in 1853. Green singled out Henry Hollyday as a representative of the brutal plantation conditions of the Eastern Shore at that time, with accounts of cruelty, overwork and neglect of the clothing and feeding of the people he enslaved at Ratcliffe.
As the second-born son, the young Henry Hollyday is said to have inherited the Ratcliffe estate due to the irresponsibility of his elder brother Thomas.
In the revocation of the original will, their father wrote “the conduct and deportment of my son Thomas… has been and still continues to be such as has given the greatest anxiety and grief.”
The estate passed from ‘the good son’ Henry on to his own son Richard, Marietta’s first husband.
When Richard passed away in 1885, Marietta Hollyday became the owner of Ratcliffe. It remained her home even after she married former U.S. Senator Charles Hopper Gibson in 1888; he moved there with her. Gibson died in 1900 and Marietta sold the home in 1905. She died in 1914. I can’t figure out where she was living at that time.
The recipe I made from her book is a classic example of 1800s recipe confusion. Break the macaroni? I’d like to see an example of what macaroni looked like in the 1890s that it had to be broken into pieces. The whole thing about straining the sauce was a little weird – maybe this would be to remove fibrous tomato pieces? I used canned tomatoes. No specific cheese was called for so I used Parmesan because that’s what I had. When making old recipes it is helpful to remember that the original cooks might not have had a lot of options themselves.
I’ll wrap up this post with an assurance from John Martin Hammond, dismissive of the harsh realities of Eastern Shore plantation life, and unfazed by the drama of the wayward son:
“Ratcliffe Manor has no ghosts and no stories of violent death or suicide. It speaks simply of gentility and good living.”
Reidsville Review, NC, 1892
Recipe:
macaroni
.5 Lb beef
1 minced onion
1 Pint tomatoes, peeled and sliced
1 piece butter
pepper, black
salt
grated cheese
Break the macaroni into inch lengths; stew twenty minutes, or till tender. Have the following sauce ready : Cut half a pound of beef into strips, and stew half an hour in cold water. Then add a minced onion and one pint tomatoes, peeled and sliced. Boil an hour and strain through a cullender after taking out the meat. The sauce should be well boiled down by this time. One pint is sufficient for a large dish of maca-
roni. Return the liquid to the saucepan; add a large piece of butter, pepper and salt, and stew till ready to dish the macaroni. Drain this well ; sprinkle lightly with salt and heap it in a dish. Pour the tomato sauce over it. Cover and let it stand in a warm place ten minutes before sending to table. Send grated cheese around with it.
Recipe from “Mrs. Charles H. Gibson’s Maryland and Virginia Cookbook”
There’s a lot of tempting 19th century options for tomato preservation. In addition to catsup, tomatoes were preserved spiced, in piccalilli, chow-chow, or stewed and strained into “soyer.” Tomatoes have one of the highest concentrations of naturally-occurring MSG, and these sauces and pickles all provided ways to add some umami to meals throughout the winter.
I settled on “Chili Sauce” or “Chilli Sauce” which, despite its name, is not really a hot-sauce fore-bearer. Bell peppers generally comprised the “peppers” component. Even swapping them out for jalapenos, the end result doesn’t carry much heat.
According to a 1994 article in the Hartford Courant (CT), “chili sauce seems to have surfaced in New England in the last half of the 19th century… How it got the name remains a mystery… especially because the original product had no chili peppers in it.” Writer Bill Daley wrote that the sauce was would have featured into the diet of seafarers during long voyages, and was used by generations of “Yankee cooks” to “jazz up winter menus,” finding its way into and onto “roast beef, lamb chops, cod cakes, baked beans, eggs – nearly everything – with this blend of tomatoes, peppers, onions, vinegar and spices.”
An 1880 Minnesota cookbook “Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping” lists Chili Sauce among the many sauces worthy of a Christmas dinner:
“Christmas Dinners. Clam soup; baked fish, Hollandaise sauce; roast turkey with oyster dressing and celery or oyster sauce, roast duck with onion sauce, broiled quail, chicken pie; plum and crab-apple jelly; baked potatoes in jackets, sweet potatoes, baked squash, turnips, southern cabbage, stewed carrots, canned corn, canned pease, tomatoes; Graham bread, rolls; salmon salad or herring salad, Chili sauce, gooseberry catsup, mangoes, pickled cabbage; bottled, French or Spanish pickles; spiced nutmeg-melon and sweet- pickled grapes, and beets; Christmas plum-pudding with sauce, charlotte-russe; cocoa-nut, mince, and peach pies; citron, pound, French loaf, white Mountain and Neapolitan cakes; lady’s fingers, peppernuts; centennial drops, almond or hickory-nut macaroons; cocoa-nut caramels, chocolate drops; orange or pine apple ice cream; coffee, tea, and Vienna chocolate.” —Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping [Buckeye Publishing Company:Minneapolis MN] 1880 via foodtimeline.org
Apparently it was a heyday for sauces, “Commercial relishes and condiments were introduced around this time, and the public developed quite a taste for them. By the 1880s, [James] Farrell said, there was a proliferation of chopping gadgets on the market for do-it-yourselfers,” wrote Bill Daley.
A biography of H.J. Heinz describes Heinz’ systematic “studying” of sauces at the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition. He encountered Tabasco but sensed that the market wasn’t ready for it.
“At the same time, Eugene Durkee or New York and William Railton or Chicago introduced pepper sauces known as ‘Chilli’ sauce. These very mild and thick sauces in hexagonally shaped bottles and cathedral square shaped bottles fascinated Heinz. The thicker, mild, ketchup-like product found a larger market in the north. Heinz introduced his as ‘Chili’ and found a large market that remains to this day.”- H.J.Heinz, A Biography, Quentin R. Skrabec, Jr. 2009
My mom uses Heinz’ Chili sauce to make cocktail sauce. Beyond that, I don’t know many uses for it. I was a little stumped at what to use my own Chilli Sauce for, with its 19th century cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and allspice. So far, some has made its way into some barbecue sauce. I guess I have all winter long to see what else I can “jazz up” with it.
Recipe:
“Twenty-four ripe tomatoes, eight onions, six peppers, eight coffee cups of vinegar, eight tablespoons of sugar, the same of salt, one tablespoonful of cinnamon, one of allspice, one of nutmeg, and one of cloves. Boil all well together and seal while hot. This is superior to tomato catsup.”
