Eliza Leslie’s “Strawberry Ice” isn’t exactly a Maryland recipe. I made this dessert to partake in the Dundurn Recipe Challenge. Since I didn’t get to a dedicated blog recipe, here it is.
Dundurn Castle is a historic site operating as a civic museum in Hamilton Ontario. The mansion was built in 1835, on the site of a former British military encampment, for railway magnate and Candian legislator Sir Allan MacNab. The estate has been the property of the city of Hamilton since 1899.
Hamilton is a long way from Maryland and indeed I have never been there. But social media has created a fun way to connect over historic cooking. For the first challenge, the people at Dundurn turned to Eliza Leslie’s 1850 “Lady’s New Receipt-book.” Leslie’s 1837 cookbook, “Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches,” was the most popular cookbook of the 19th-century cook-book boom, and her recipes were shared and imitated far and wide.
The confectioners’ hand-book, E. Skuse, 1883