Tag: pies

Lemon Ice Box Pie, Mrs. Harry C. Michael

Next time you drop a few ice cubes into a cold beverage think of this: many early-20th-century consumers would be wary of your “artificial” ice. Unless of course, your ice happens to be harvested from a lake or a mountain somewhere.

The technology to create ice from water was first developed in the mid-1800s, but it caught on slowly. The ice trade continued to collect ice from natural stores and ship it around the country.

It’s no surprise that manufactured ice might scare consumers. Think of how strange it must have seemed. As always, industry had to sway the public. The Maryland Ice Company took out an ad in the Baltimore Sun in 1892 declaring that “manufactured ice is not only purer, but will last longer and produce equally as much cold as ‘natural ice.”

1888

Apparently, this was still a concern in 1923 when an American Ice company ad in the Evening Sun explained to readers that “American Ice is… made from filtered water and frozen in sanitary plants,” and that it was “very real, absolutely pure Ice.” The ad stated that American Ice had nine plants in Baltimore “all making clean, pure, healthful ice.”

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Black Russian Pie, Mary Ellen Beachley

It’s interesting to ponder the ways in which different political impulses and movements have had an effect on recipes.

For instance, did the “Women’s Club Movement” and the Progressive Era result in cookbooks that would otherwise have not been produced, and recipes that may not have otherwise been documented? Or would community cookbooks have been an inevitability, produced by churches, causes, and maybe just “because,” whether women wanted to change the world or not?

There is no way to know of course. I only know that there are many cookbooks made by women’s clubs or guilds around the state and that they began with the Progressive era of the 1890s and continued up through at least the 1980s.
“Women’s Club Favorites,” made by the Women’s Club of Hagerstown in 1986 is one of my more recent cookbooks in this vein.

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Pawpaw Pretzel Pie

I decided to do one last pawpaw recipe before the season is over. After last week’s pawpaw cream pie, I wondered what it would be like to cross it with strawberry pretzel salad.

When I approached the Two Boots Farm stand I felt a little bad. Colorful edible flowers sat alluringly displayed in plastic clamshells. Cartons of shisito peppers were laid out. Behind the pawpaw table, another table of offerings. When I reached out later, Elisa from Two Boots farm told me ” Yes, sometimes I think people oversee our flowers when they are hunting for the pawpaws (two very different customers really). But we do have a lot of social media followers that I suspect found us because of pawpaws but they started asking us for wedding flower quotes or joining our flower share. In September people flock to us for the pawpaws but if I look at the sales numbers cut flowers are still our best selling item this time of the year.”

I ended up working with pectin to make a vegetarian recipe that could easily be made vegan. It could also be made with milk gelatin (minus cinnamon) for those who don’t want to deal with the pectin.

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“Poor Man’s Pecan Pie,” A. Fay Attaway/Kahl-Winter

Here’s another recipe from a Western Maryland church cookbook. This time, St. Pauls Church Clear Spring Maryland.

The contributor, Mrs. Fay Kahl-Winter, was originally from Georgia, born in 1933, full name Audrey Fay Attaway. When this cookbook was published, she was married to Herbert Kahl-Winter. In 1976 she married Robert Curtis Shaffer.

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“Lemon Cheese Cakes,” Ann Cadwalader Ringgold Schley

The Wikipedia entry for “Chess pie” offers up several possible explanations for the name – the pie is named for a piece of furniture called a pie chest, or for the town of Chester, England. Some theories are just silly. “It’s jes’ pie.” Okay… whatever.

The likely explanation is that “chess pie” evolved from recipes like this recipe for “cheese cakes” and that the “cheese” morphed into “chess,” possibly due to the confusing lack of cheese in the filling.

These are not quite like the “cheese cakes” Elizabeth Ellicott Lea included in her 1845 cookbook. Lea’s cheesecakes are made from curd and combined with pulverized almonds and flavorings. This recipe, on the other hand, contains no actual cheese and very little dairy- but it is easy to see the similarity. The basic formula was very popular in British cookbooks at the time.

Many “cheese cake” recipes contain pulverized almonds. Some recipes, such as the one in Hannah Glasse’s 1786 “The Art of Cookery,” include the peel of the lemon, cooked and blended into the custard. Others present the pie filling as a preserved product that you can keep in a jar for a year before baking into a pie. A second recipe included in Glasse’s book appears to be a direct antecedent to Mrs. Schley’s recipe – a very tasty recipe, I might add.

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