Open just about any Maryland community cookbook from the 1980s, and you’re likely to find a recipe for Crab Meltaways. They’re easy, tasty, and great for company.
Most recipes call for “Kraft Old English Cheese Spread,” a product that, as far as I can tell, debuted in the 1930s. It is likely that the recipe for Crab Meltaways (also known as “Crabbies”) was developed by Kraft in the 1960s, but there are other variations without the product. John Shields included a recipe from Susan Corsaro in his 1992 “Chesapeake Bay Crab Cookbook,” using cheddar cheese, fresh garlic, and parsley.
1932
The ingredients are gently mixed, piled atop split English muffins (often cut into wedges), and frozen. From the frozen state, they broil into a bubbly melted pile of deliciousness.
One of my recipes suggests canned crabmeat because these don’t really necessitate the good stuff.
Jukie Todd from Crisfield didn’t have that concern. A lifetime employee of her family’s MeTompkin Bay Oyster Company, she surely had plenty of crab to work with. Her recipe was included in the Women’s Ministries Faith Fellowship Church’s 1989 cookbook, unfortunately named “Plantation Favorites.” Todd had died in 1986, so the recipe must have been shared by friend or family.
“[The Eastern Shore’s] biggest booster lives in Chestertown,” wrote W.C. Thurston in the preface to his book The Eastern Shore (of Maryland) In Song and Story. She was “a fair daughter of the Shore who typed two stories for us when we needed only one.”
Westcott contributed two odes to the book, one to the Eastern Shore in general, and one written to honor the Ann McKim, the “first of the Baltimore clippers”, “adored by all the skippers.”
Westcott was born Nellie Charlotte Schneider in 1887 to Louis H Schneider and Nellie S Ernesty, residents of Washington DC. In 1900, Nell was living in New York with her mother and teaching music. According to Nell’s mothers 1932 obituary, the elder Nellie was founder of her town library and active in the civic and social life of Pleasant Valley, New York.
In 1910 or 1911, Nell married Fred B. Westcott from New Jersey. Their daughter Dorothy was born in 1911. The couple and their children settled back in Chestertown by 1930. There, Nell worked for the government in the employment office and the Chamber of Commerce, but found time to pen a column in the Chestertown Enterprise of tidbits, notes, and praise for her home region. As secretary for the Chamber of Commerce, she had dealings in issues ranging from poultry farms brokering Thanksgiving turkeys to the groundwork for the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.
Nell C. Westcott was just the type of person to end up on the radar of Frederick Phillip Stieff when he was compiling Eat, Drink & Be Merry in Maryland. That book includes Nell’s recipes for Crab Cakes, Potato Rolls, Oyster Pie, Lemon Butter, and Rusks.
I’ve come across a fair share of librarians in my cookbooks. Librarians might be next behind home economists as far as professions of recipe-contributors goes.
Unfortunately, I could find scarce information about Ruth Wood, who contributed this “good luncheon dish” to “Once Upon A Thyme in Charles Village” in 1972. Her name is too common to easily search, but the recipe caption associates her with the Waverly Branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library.
Ruth Wood was born Ruth Staebner in Tennessee in 1920. She grew up in Falls Church, Virginia. She attended the College of William and Mary before coming to Baltimore to work at the library. A book-mobile librarian in the 1960s, Wood was promoted to head up the Waverly Branch in 1971, when the library opened at its current location on 33rd street, replacing the “Homestead Branch” on 1442 Gorsuch Avenue.
Definition of olio 2a: a miscellaneous mixture : HODGEPODGE — Merriam-Webster
It didn’t take too many years of research for me to come to the disappointing realization that a lot of the romantic notions I’d held about recipes were simply not true. “Recipes” are not exact formulas. They can never really live up to the promise of conjuring up an exact place or time. Authenticity is a nebulous and possibly meaningless concept. Few recipes are truly as regional as we’d like to believe. Even fewer recipes were “invented” by any one cook or chef in some inspired moment.
Take the iconic crab cake: the ultimate ‘Maryland’ food. When I search for crab cakes in pre-1900s newspapers I find menu listings and recipes from Pennsylvania, California, New York, Texas, Kentucky… and more.
Other favorite recipes originated as corporate promotions, taking on a life of their own in the hands of home cooks until their unexciting origins become obscured.
I’ve come to accept all of this and I’ve largely dispensed with hierarchies of recipe value and validity.
Having said all that, how do I feel when I find a unique recipe, so unmistakably Maryland, created by a cook and spread organically by word of mouth? Pretty intrigued.
Sometime in the early 1900s, Mabel Roberts took a vacation to the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. She returned with recipes from a memorable meal she had enjoyed: fried Sea Bass with Remoulade sauce. She jotted them down into her “Housekeeper’s Casket and Cook’s Delight,” a blank recipe notebook printed by the Baltimore press Cushings & Bailey. With leather tabs labeled “soups,” “meats,” “fish,” etc., the publisher modestly advertised that the blank book was “the only scientific and perfect form of book for preservation of recipes ever made.” Roberts filled its pages with recipes and household hints collected from Good Housekeeping, some from “Auntie” and “Mama,” and these two complimentary recipes from that vacation meal.
Although I’m not positive who Mabel Roberts was, my “prime suspect” is Mabel Junkins, who was born in 1881 to Baltimore pickle manufacturer J. Wm. Junkins and his wife Alice V. Davis. Mabel married William Calvert Roberts and lived in the Roland Park neighborhood of Baltimore. She passed away in 1959. J. William Junkins was originally from Biddeford Maine, which is less than 100 miles from the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
When the Mount Washington Hotel was being built in the White Mountains, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle declared it a “modern palatial house” to rival the tourist palaces found at Niagara and Yosemite. “From the dining room… one looks into Jefferson Notch and across the green golf links to the Presidential range.” In addition to the dining and ballrooms, the hotel boasted offices and “public rooms,” 350 sleeping rooms with “the modern requirement of private baths.”
The hotel opened in 1902, built in nearly the same spot where Ethan Allen Crawford had operated an inn in the mid-1800s. The Crawford family had moved to the area as pioneers working the trade route, but eventually, they became a crucial part of developing the White Mountains into a New England tourist destination where people could escape the stresses of bustling cities like Baltimore.
New York Daily Tribute, 1903
According to Dona Brown in “Inventing New England,” in the nineteenth century, “an entirely new kind of tourism was shaping the region. This new tourism was driven by a profound ‘sentimentalization’ of… a mythic region called Old New England – rural, preindustrial, and ethnically ‘pure’ – a reverse image of all that was most unsettling in late nineteenth-century urban life.”
At first a destination for mountain-climbers, the White Mountains became a place that remained geographically wild but “overflowing with noisy, unquiet company… and… all kinds of noisy pleasures.” “Champagne corks fly about at the hotels, gentlemen sit and play cards in the middle of the day, ladies talk about dress-makers and fashions,” according to Frederika Bremer in 1849.
In the 1910s, travelers could spend time playing tennis or golf, hiking or taking a rail trip to Mount Washington’s summit. At the hotel, amenities included a ballroom, indoor pool, and meals prepared by a European chef who the New York Tribune declared had “the prestige of a chef from Delmonico’s.” In fact, the closest recipe I could find to this remoulade formula is in Delmonico’s chef Charles Ranhofer’s 1894 tome “The Epicurean.”
Indoor Pool at Mount Washington Hotel, baharris.org
Mabel Roberts may have reached the hotel by taking the famous B&O Royal Blue line to New York and transferring to the Connecticut River Line, or she could have followed the Evening Sun’s 1919 advice to take a boat to Boston and complete the journey on the Maine Central Railway. The trip by train or boat would have been accompanied by fashionable meals, time spent in library-smoker-observation or parlor cars, and socializing with other travelers.
But there was another option. In 1906, the Tribune wrote that “more than forty automobiles of regular guests in the Bretton Woods garage tell the store of motoring the hills and the hold it has upon the summer visitors here.” Brochures and newspaper guides provided maps of scenic routes for “tours” en route to and from the many vacation destinations. In 1917, a Baltimore Sun headline declared: “Vacation In Car Ideal.” “Expense of Month Costs Price of Railroad Fares,” read the subtitle. The next year, a similar article noted that “practically everything possible has been done by state and town officials to add to the comfort of automobile tourists.” The Sun “Hotel and Resort Bureau” offered travel assistance to readers by phone.
The rise of the auto age may have brought clientele to the grand old hotels, but cars also helped usher in their decline. Dona Brown wrote that “instead of large numbers of stationary guests who stayed for a month or more, the automobile brought unpredictable, vagrant overnight guests.” While the “old-fashioned Victorian hotels had been designed with public interaction with strangers in mind,” cars “made it possible to frame the entire touring experience, even getting there, in complete privacy… automobiles fostered industries that provided greater privacy on arrival” like motels, cottages and boarding houses.
“Most of the great White Mountain hotels burned down. Such large frame structures had always been susceptible to winter fires (often suspiciously well-timed to wipe out financial obligations without much danger to guests or workers), but by the end of the nineteenth century they were no longer being rebuilt,” wrote Brown.
One of the rare survivors is, in fact, the Mount Washington Hotel, which still stands in all its splendor on a mountain that Nathanial Hawthorne declared an “undecaying monument” to its namesake.
Recipes:
Remoulade:
“Blanche one shallot – anchovy paste to give flavor & color – 2 yolks of hard boiled eggs _ = raw eggs
Pinch English mustard salt and pepper to taste blended with tarragon vinegar – consistency of mayonnaise dressing add parsley chives”
Fried Sea Bass:
“Split fish and remove bones – Dip in flour then in egg then in bread crumbs.”
Notes: Anchovy paste to give color?! Uh. Anyway, the main thing to note for this is that I ended up cooking it to thicken it up, like a boiled dressing. Maybe I added too much vinegar or didn’t properly emulsify things. Luckily the herbs are added at the end so it turned out good. The Sea Bass recipe is a thing of beauty in its vagueness; I followed my heart.
Recipes from “Mabel Roberts Cookbook,” n.d., Maryland Historical Society MS 2755
