pound cake Archives - OLD LINE PLATE

The opening of the Atlantic Hotel in 1875 is often regarded as the official “founding” of Ocean City.

If you wanted to visit the little beach town in those days, you had to take a boat or a train across the Sinepuxent Bay.

Train passengers often arrived to town covered in ash and soot. Nonetheless, the journey was a part of the experience.

Ocean City train station, kilduffs.com

Besides, the soot wasn’t the last mess to deal with. There was, of course, lots of sand. In 1910 a permanent boardwalk was built to elevate vacationers from the perils of sand.

A highway bridge to Ocean City was built a few years later. At last, the beach could be enjoyed without too much inconvenience from soot OR sand.

Ocean City remained a sleepy little beach town. When John B. Lynch, his wife Ruth, and his mother Minnie built the Commander Hotel on 14th street in 1930, it was a bit of a risky prospect. On the northernmost end of the “city”, the property was beyond the end of the boardwalk and a bit out of the way.

In 1933, an August hurricane changed everything. Residents watched as huge waves battered the barrier island, buildings washed away, and the boardwalk was destroyed. Thirteen lives were lost, and the road and railways linking the island to the mainland were no more. At the south end of the island, the Sinepuxent Bay washed a stretch of land out into the ocean, creating an inlet directly from the Atlantic to the bay.

Fishermen were overjoyed at this last bit. No longer would they have to drag their ocean catches across the island to the safe harbor of the bay. Federal funding was quickly secured to preserve the inlet from filling back up with sand. The new inlet became a crucial fishing port. Ocean City was now much more than a sleepy resort; it was the “White Marlin Capital of the World,” attracting sport and commercial fishermen. In the year 1939, 161 white marlins were caught – two by President Roosevelt.

Commander Hotel, Boston Public Library

The Commander Hotel proved to be a gamble that paid off. It was expanded over the years and incorporated attractions like clambakes and dinner theater.

The hotel was known for their food; three meals were included with the price of a room. Sometimes, guests enjoyed clams and corn served at long tables on the beach, or they dressed up in coats and ties to have dinner in the dining room in the evenings. John Lynch, Jr., the son of founders John & Ruth Lynch, contributed this Peach Brandy Pound Cake recipe to the 1995 book “Maryland’s Historic Restaurants and Their Recipes,” noting that in addition to the cake being a favorite in the Commander’s dining room, his own family enjoys it around Christmas.

And it is indeed a great pound cake – moist, flavorful, and just sweet enough.

The old Commander Hotel was torn down in 1997 to make way for something larger and more modern. By this time, hotel meals were no longer an important part of vacationer’s stays, with the plentiful restaurant options in town. The current building fits in with the other large hotels full of generic rooms that serve more as a place to stay than a destination in itself. Guest Norris Lanford recalled as much on eve of the hotel’s demolition: “I didn’t go to Ocean City. I went to the Commander Hotel.”

In a town built on a barrier island, where everything could be one big storm away from washing into the sea, change is the one thing you can count on.

Recipe:

1 Cup butter
3 Cups sugar
6 egg
3 Cup flour
.25 Teaspoon baking soda
1 Cup yogurt (or sour cream as called for in the original)
2 Teaspoon rum
1 Teaspoon orange extract
.25 Teaspoon almond extract
.666 Teaspoon lemon extract
.5 Cup peach brandy

Cream butter and gradually add sugar. Add eggs 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking soda, and salt; add to creamed mixture alternately with yogurt, beating well after each addition. Stir in flavorings. Pour batter into a greased and floured 10-inch tube pan. Bake at 325 degrees for 1 hour and 20 minutes or until cake tests done.

Recipe adapted from “Maryland’s Historic Restaurants and Their Recipes” by Dawn O’Brien and Rebecca Schenck

Mid-century food has been a running fascination/source of mockery since the early days of the internet. Even before the widespread popularization of organic, homegrown ingredients, people had largely turned away from the technicolor kitchen adventurism found in old recipe cards.

A few weeks ago there was a New York Times article addressing what I have referred to on this site as “mid-century peculiarities” about food and cooking.

“The women of the Women’s Education Association badly wanted the sacrosanct light of science to illuminate women’s work — done in the kitchen — with an emphasis on what was replicable, observable, gradable and expressive of human dominance over and mastery of nature. “ – Betty Crocker’s Absurd, Gorgeous Atomic-Age Creations by Tamar Adler, New York Times

The article generated a moderate amount of buzz. As far as I can tell, the real story lies somewhere between the grandiose claims and the somewhat joyless rebuttals.

Much like those two extremes, we often fall on similar “either/or” dichotomies when it comes to food in culture. “Local, fresh and organic” may fit the general modern notion of purity in food, but not too long ago ‘purity’ meant the exact opposite. The “suffocating sanitizing” actually dates back further than the age of Betty Crocker and it stemmed from a legitimate need to escape spoilage and contamination.

What gets lost in all of this is any kind of nuance or fluidity. Take my great-grandmother for instance; she fished, she farmed… and she made “Vanilla Butternut Cake.”

Tied to the cap of the bottle found in the cabinets of every member of my family is the recipe for this easy and delicious pound cake. While it may not have the panache of shrimp enshrined in green Jell-O or potato salad pressed into loaf form, the central ingredient in the cake is unmistakably from the past.

The origin story on the North Carolina-based Superior Flavors’ website makes little attempts to obscure their products’ lab-grown origins. The explanation is that the line of flavors were simply invented by chemist Jerry Fox in the 1930s for his wife Violet.

A few years ago my aunt took the effort to make sure our supplies were replenished, and for Christmas she gave each family member their own bottle of Superior “Vanilla, Butter & Nut” flavoring along with a copy of the recipe. She reminisced about my great-grandmother making this cake around the holidays, how heavenly it smelled, and she noted that one bottle might well last a lifetime.

In chef Sean Brock’s book “Heritage” he included a recipe for Velveeta fudge, wryly noting that for him, Velveeta was a ‘heritage ingredient.’ As it turns out, “Imitation Vanilla, Butter & Nut Flavoring” is a heritage ingredient for my family.

It was only when I began to write this entry that I came to realize that this cake recipe isn’t as ubiquitous as I’d assumed. The flavoring can’t be found in most grocery stores (although substitutes exist), and the origin of the recipe and even the company were hard to locate.

When I searched old newspapers for the pound cake recipe, Maryland had the most results. Even Superior Flavors’ home-state of North Carolina didn’t offer any clues.

The recipe was making the rounds here in Maryland papers in the 1970s, particularly Western Maryland, near where my Great Grandmother was from.

Two different people won the same cooking contest in different years with this cake, first in 1973 and then in 1977. The contest in question had the oh-so-challenging restriction that the recipes must contain… eggs.

Now that I know that “Vanilla Butternut Cake” isn’t as common as say, green-bean casserole, I will probably bake it more often. It lacks the glorious kitsch of neon aspics, and the spiritual gravitas of hand-preserved garden harvests, but it fits quite nicely into real life.

Recipe:

1.5 cups sugar
.25 cups Crisco
1 stick of butter
pinch of salt
2 eggs
1.5 cups flour
.5 cups evaporated milk
2 tsp vanilla-butter-nut flavoring

Cream together shortening, butter, sugar and salt. Beat in eggs one at a time. Alternately add in flour & milk, ending with flour. Fold in flavoring by hand. Pour into a greased tube or bundt pan. Place in cold oven, turn oven on to 325°. Bake for one hour & 45 minutes. Don’t peek! Remove from pan immediately.

★ I once made this cake using 1/3 coconut flour & adding extra milk (per coconut flour instructions) and it was excellent!

Great Grandma Cross in the Cacapon River

Tag: pound cake

Peach Brandy Pound Cake, Commander Hotel

Vanilla Butternut (Pound) Cake

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