In 1948, three recipes of the wife of one Robert Valliant appeared in the now-legendary community cookbook, one that has seen many reprints over the years: “A Cook’s Tour of the Eastern Shore.” The Valliant family lineage is so enmeshed into Maryland’s lower Eastern Shore that it was hard to determine which Robert Valliant I…
Open just about any Maryland community cookbook from the 1980s, and you’re likely to find a recipe for Crab Meltaways.
My friend Kate knew just where to take us to dinner when we visited. The exterior of the Governor Francis Inn in Warwick, Rhode Island didn’t convey much. But when we stepped inside surrounded by wood paneling and golden lighting, I felt like I’d been here a hundred times before. A stone-clad gas fireplace in…
“[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…
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…