My plan to roll out high-quality content in 2020 got off to an inauspicious start when I decided to make “Barbecued Hot Dogs.” It’s not that the dish wasn’t great- it is hot dogs after all – but January isn’t exactly a time when people have frankfurters on the mind, nor is there much of a sheen of “Marylandness” to hot dogs. Nevertheless, I had the main ingredient in the freezer, nearing the end of its useful life.
At any rate, the source cookbook, “Queen Anne Goes to the Kitchen,” is itself a Maryland classic. Both the 1962 original and the 1993 update are chock full of recipes from Centreville-area cooks whose Eastern Shore roots run deep.
Hamburgers are one of those foods that are possibly under-represented in cookbooks due to their sheer simplicity. Although recipes for “hamburgh sausage” or “hamburg steaks” appear in cookbooks dating as far back as 1758, most of the hamburger recipes in my Maryland cookbooks come from the 1950s and 1960s. It was a time when there was a little more experimenting going on in home kitchens, and these recipes tend to have some special touch or sauce.
“Queen Anne Goes to the Kitchen” (1962), the source for this recipe, also contains recipes for “Belmost Sauce” and “Aloha Sauce” for hamburgers. “Hamburgers Diane” is a twist on Steak Diane, a popular dish at the time which, according to Wikipedia, “was considered dated by 1980.” Steak Diane’s origin isn’t entirely clear but it is often attributed to Chef Beniamino Schiavon of the Drake Hotel in New York. Table-side flambé, as seen in this recipe, was a popular fad in the mid-20th century.
Washington College yearbook, 1959
One completely baffling aspect to this recipe was an instruction to salt the pan and heat until the salt turns brown. I’m pretty sure that salt does not brown? Maybe the salt used in 1962 had some different impurities? I honestly don’t know so I ignored that instruction.
These burgers would be fine on a bun (brioche perhaps? to keep it fancy…) but I already had the wild rice thing going so we went bun-less.
All in all it was a tasty burger, but that is always going to come down to the quality of the meat and how you salt and cook it… not some gimmicky sauce.
The recipe contributor, Lynette Morgan Nielsen was born Esther Lynette Morgan in Montreal, 1912. Her mother, Esther Judson appears to have come from money.
Dealth of Lynette Nielsen’s grandfather, 1910, Post-Standard (Syracuse, NY)
Lynette’s grandfather Edward Barker Judson, Jr., according to one obituary, “was one of the grand men of Syracuse.” He was “the son of a wealthy father and the inheritor of a large fortune from his uncle” and became president of First National Bank of Syracuse. At some point Lynette married Orsen N. Nielsen, a U.S. Diplomat. The two traveled the world as he served in Russia, Sweden, Germany, Ireland, Iran and Australia. Orsen Nielsen retired from the U.S. Foreign Service in 1952 and the family settled in Centreville.
There, Lynette served as a trustee of Washington College. An annual art prize was named in her honor. She contributed to Atkins Arboretum at Tuckahoe State Park, and a mental health services annex of Queen Anne’s County Health Department, which was named in her honor. She passed away in 1984.
Lynette’s well-traveled and philanthropic life is yet another example of the many citizens who contributed to “Queen Anne Goes to the Kitchen,” now a classic Maryland cookbook whose reputation has spread throughout the state.
Recipe:
1 Lb good beef, ground
2 Tablespoon freshly ground black pepper
2 Tablespoons cognac
chives or onion pieces
butter
Shape beef lightly into cakes, sprinkle with pepper and press pepper into cakes. Let stand 30 minutes. Sprinkle a light layer of salt over bottom of a heavy frying pan. Turn heat to high, and when pan is hot [or when “salt begins to brown” according to the recipe??] add hamburgers.
Cook until well browned on each side, reduce heat and cook until done to taste. Place a pat of butter on each burger, pour cognac over top and set ablaze.
Sprinkle cakes with chives or dried onions before serving.
Recipe adapted from “Queen Anne Goes to the Kitchen”
I actually cooked this dinner quite awhile ago but I haven’t posted it because of frustrations. The recipe was contributed to “Queen Anne Goes to The Kitchen” by Margaret Gadd Ashley of the Centreville area. Despite some obvious relation to Janet Gadd Doehler of “Cheddar Chowder,” I couldn’t find out much about Margaret Gadd Ashley. I believe she was born in 1908. She passed away in 1980. Her husband descended from a family of blacksmiths who operated in Kent and Queen Anne’s county from the late 1800s up until World War II when a scarcity of materials made the trade impractical.
The story of the Ashley blacksmiths, as well as every grueling detail of a property they once owned can be found in this epic Maryland Historical Trust report.
Weird comic from 1940.
There are a few specious ideas about the origins of Welsh Rarebit and its name that annoy me too much to even write about… so I’ll stick to Wikipedia on this one.
Michael Quinion writes: “Welsh rabbit is basically cheese on toast (the word is not ‘rarebit’ by the way, that’s the result of false etymology; ‘rabbit’ is here being used in the same way as ‘turtle’ in ‘mock-turtle soup’, which has never been near a turtle, or ‘duck’ in ‘Bombay duck’, which was actually a dried fish called bummalo)”. – Wikipedia
Wikipedia also claims that “The word rarebit has no other use than in Welsh rabbit” but this recipe in Eat, Drink & Be Merry in Maryland contradicts that:
No cheese in sight. The above actually sounds like a recipe for panhas/scrapple. The conflation is indeed curious.
In his 1926 edition of the Dictionary of Modern English Usage, the grammarian H. W. Fowler states a forthright view: “Welsh Rabbit is amusing and right. Welsh Rarebit is stupid and wrong.” – Wikipedia
Aside from that recipe, the only other Welsh Rarebit/Rabbit recipe in my database is from Mrs. B.C. Howard’s 1881 “Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen.”
Origins and etymology aside, this is obviously a delicious and satisfying dish and a good meal for a cold winter night.
1887 rarebit humor
Recipe:
1.5 Tablespoon butter
1.5 Tablespoon flour
1.5 Cup milk
2 Cups sharp cheese
.5 Teaspoon mustard powder
.5 Teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
Make a roux of butter & flour on low heat. Gradually add milk. Add cheese and let it melt slowly; then add other seasonings. Pour over Uneeda biscuits, English muffins, or toast. Optional: Gently broil for a minute or two before serving.
Recipe Adapted from “Queen Anne Goes to The Kitchen”
Community cookbooks are a mixed blessing for me.
On one hand they’re such a fantastic window into the kitchens of the more middle-class citizens as opposed to the fabulous lifestyles of “Eat, Drink & Be Merry in Maryland” or “Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen.”
Flipping through the pages you can see changing trends, adventurous cooking and old family recipes, and pride and love expressed in (mostly) housewives feeding their family and friends.
The Park School Cook Book (1964), Art Work Miss Grace Van Order
Loyola Recipes(1974), sketches by Eileen F. Bolgiano
On the other hand there are HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of these books, churches and schools making slight updates, revising year after year and it’s a bit hard to keep up with or to fit into bookshelf and budget.
The first community cookbook was published during the Civil War. Yankee women determined to raise money for field hospitals organized themselves into what they called “Sanitation Commissions” and devised a way to make their domestic skills marketable: At a fair held in Philadelphia in 1864, they offered their own recipes under the title A Poetical Cook-Book…
After the war, women’s clubs organized cookbook projects to benefit widows, veterans and orphans. By 1915, as many as 6,000 community cookbooks had been published in the United States, and women were raising money to fund kindergartens and promote temperance and other political causes.
Magician in the Kitchen(1980), Federated Garden Clubs of Maryland. drawing: Mrs. David MacTaggart, Jr., Gibson Island
One of the oldest Maryland community cookbooks available on Google Books is “Tested Maryland Recipes,” compiled and published by the Ladies of the Presbyterian Church, Chesapeake City Maryland, that book contains assorted classics of Maryland cooking such as white potato pie as well as household advice such as tips “to keep ice.”
Tested Maryland Recipes
Queen Anne Goes to the Kitchen is perhaps one of the more famous of Maryland Community Cookbooks. It was first published in 1962 by The Episcopal Church Women of St. Paul’s Parish in Queen Anne’s County. That book bears many Maryland ancestral names and an assortment of contemporary and family recipes as well as some nice illustrations.
Queen Anne Goes to the Kitchen, Artwork: Stephanie Thompson, Sally Clark, Hallie Rugg
However, it takes an assortment of these types of cookbooks to compile a reasonable cross-section of Maryland food. In some school cookbooks we might find a more diverse array of names suggesting the ongoing immigrant contribution to Maryland menus.
Magician in the Kitchen(1980), Federated Garden Clubs of Maryland, Recipe Sketch Mrs. William G. Hill, Jr., Garden Club of Frederick
For the time being, I try to draw the line at buying books published after 1990. It’s a pretty arbitrary rule although it is likely that the proliferation of food blogs, cooking websites, and the internet recipe commentariat have chipped away at the vitality of a community cookbook in a typical household in that span of time. Meanwhile, thousands of community cookbooks continue to float around indefinitely, finding their way into the hands of historians and fanatics.
Black-Eyed Susan Country(1987), Published by the Saint Agnes Hospital Auxiliary, art James E. Toher, M.D.
Mrs. Jas S Hopper (Ella Griffith), editor of “Tested Maryland Recipes, Bethel Cemetry, Chesapeake City (findagrave.com)
First Published in 1962 by The Episcopal Church Women of St. Paul’s Parrish in Queen Anne’s County, this spiral bound cookbook is of a type I come across frequently – the church or fund-raiser “community” cookbook. Usually spiral-bound, printed by various specialty companies, and containing home-grown illustrations if you’re lucky, these volumes are a great resource of recipes of ordinary people throughout several decades of the 20th century. They are also a huge source of frustration to a completist such as myself.
This recipe was contributed to “Queen Anne Goes to the Kitchen” by a Mrs. Janet Gadd Doehler. Mrs. Doehler resided on the historical Sidney Gadd farm in Centreville Maryland, described in this Maryland Historical Trust document as “a very plain mid-19th century three bay; two and one half story frame building. It is unusual for that date in that the original kitchen was in the basement where there is a cooking fireplace.”
It seems possible that Janet is still alive – google turns up an award winning gardener in that general area and a ‘Janet and Sydney Gadd Doehler’ as supporters of Adkins Arboretum, also in that general area. I feel remiss that I did not get in touch with her – when working with newer recipes I sometimes forget that the involved parties may still be available.
The first thing that most culinary historians will encounter in the older “receipt” collections or cooking texts is the lack of instructions by modern standards. “Cook it ’til it’s done,” is sometimes the extent of it. Ascookbooks progress on to modernity, recipes get more and more informative. Yet even here we see examples of assuming a basic knowledge of cooking skills. “Make a white sauce with margarine, flour, and milk” is part of the instructions.
I used what I had on hand, substituting shallot for onion and cooked thick bacon for ham. Pretty liberal I guess. I also used butter instead of margarine because I don’t F around with the latter. I guess I ought to go post an angry review about how it didn’t turn out.
Actually it turned out tasty and hearty. In fact, using what you have on hand is often an accurate way to get in the spirit of older recipes. I also used stock instead of boiling water because I have to keep the constant kitchen scraps stock cycle going infinitely.∞
2 Cups boiling water or stock
2 Cups diced potato
.5 Cup sliced carrot
1 Cup celery
.5 Cup chopped onion
1.5 Teaspoons salt
.25 Teaspoons black pepper
.25 Cup butter
.25 Cup flour
2 Cups milk
2 Cups shredded Cheddar cheese
.125 Teaspoon baking soda
1 Cup cubed, cooked ham
Add water to vegetables, salt and pepper. Cover and simmer for 10 minutes. Do not drain. Make a white sauce with butter, flour, and milk. Add cheese and soda; stir until melted. Cool the stock and vegetables to lukewarm. (Be sure vegetables are not hot. If cream sauce is added to the hot mixture, it will curdle.) Add ham and un-drained vegetables to cream sauce. Heat. Do not boil. Serves 6 to 8.
Variation: Omit ham and substitute 8 slices of crumbled bacon or 1 cup of cooked shrimp.
Recipe Adapted from “Queen Anne Goes to the Kitchen”
