The Baltimore Sun advertised in April of 1909 that they would be running two features in their Sunday editions, with soup recipes from M. Henri Casalegno, a former chef at the Maryland Club. That credential was apt to make Baltimore housewives pay attention. H.L. Mencken certainly knew that when he gave the chef the freelance writing assignments. Mencken later recalled that the Italian-born chef’s articles were “done in very fair English.”
Caselagno did not apparently hold the “housewife cook” in high regard. “The failures of the housewife cook are often due to her failure properly to season the food she cooks,” he wrote. To be fair to Casalegno, a preachy condescending tone was the norm for cookery advice of the day. Casalegno may simply have been embellishing his prowess by emulating others. It wouldn’t be the last time he did so.
Caselagno had been working as a chef in hotel kitchens since his arrival in the U.S. in 1904. In his first stateside position at the Hotel Renssalaer in Troy New York, he’d had a quarrel with another chef, Paul Lescaux. The altercation resulted in Lescaux’s death. According to Caselagno, Lescaux had lunged at him, landing with a knife in the heart. Caselagno served four years in prison for this “accident,” before finding his way into the Maryland Club and the Baltimore Sun columns.
It’s pretty rare that I should have *too much information* about a person associated with a recipe. For years now I’ve sighed in frustration when all I can find on someone is a date of birth, a passing newspaper mention, a headstone.
This week’s recipe comes from a woman who has been so scrutinized and written about that there is practically no point in summarizing her life story.
Wallis Simpson, The Duchess of Windsor, remains a fascinating figure to many. Any time members of the British royal family come up in the news, many Baltimoreans like to reflect on our city’s brush with royalty.
“The Mier expedition was an unsuccessful military operation launched in November 1842 by a Texian militia against Mexican border settlements…. On December 20, 1842, some 308 Texan soldiers, who had ignored orders to pull back from the Rio Grande to Gonzales, approached Ciudad Mier… The Texans were unaware that 3,000 Mexican troops were in the area under the command of generals Francisco Mexia and Pedro de Ampudia. In the Battle of Mier that resulted, the Texians were outnumbered ten to one… diplomatic efforts on behalf of Texas by the foreign ministers of the United States and Great Britain led [Antonio López de Santa Anna, the ruler of Mexico] to compromise: he said one in ten of the prisoners would be killed. To help determine who would die, Huerta had 159 white beans and 17 black beans placed in a pot. In what came to be known as the Black Bean Episode or the Bean Lottery, the Texans were blindfolded and ordered to draw beans. Officers and enlisted men, in alphabetical order, were ordered to draw. The seventeen men who drew black beans were allowed to write letters home before being executed by firing squad.” – The Mier Expedition, Wikipedia
This Wikipedia excerpt brought to you by: nothing to write about this soup.
I got the recipe from “Eat, Drink & Be Merry in Maryland,” where it is credited to Mrs. Charles B. Trail. There was a junior and a senior Charles Bayard Trail but I believe the recipe may be from the elder Trail, who lived from 1857-1914 and served as Secretary of Legation to Brazil in the 1880s. In 1889 he married Grace Winebrener (1870-1941). Both came from prominent families in Frederick; their wedding was covered by the local news as well as the New York Times.
Seeing as how Mr. Trail spent some time in Brazil, it is tempting to draw a connection between the soup and Feijoada, which is sometimes served with orange slices. However, recipes similar to this one show up in several US cookbooks from the 1870s onward, in places far from Maryland as Chicago and Seattle.
Bean soup when done right is a simple process with a complex flavor. Unfortunately, my experimenting with the electric pressure cooker did this one a disservice. I overcooked it and it came out kind of flat. I should have maybe done ten or fifteen minutes instead of twenty-five (natural release) and I should have resisted the instinct to integrate the ingredients, instead layering them with the meats (browned, perhaps) on the bottom and onions (sautéed, perhaps) on the top. Well, now I know! And now back to our unrelated filler:
“In 1847, during the Mexican-American War, the U.S. Army occupied northeastern Mexico. Captain John E. Dusenbury, a white bean survivor, returned to El Rancho Salado and exhumed the remains of his comrades… They were buried in a large common tomb in 1848, in a cement vault on a bluff one mile south of La Grange. The grave site is now part of a state park, the Monument Hill and Kreische Brewery State Historic Sites.”
Soak 1 pint beans overnight in cold water. Put the beans in 6 quarts cold water with ½ lb salt pork, a beef bone, 1 onion, 1 carrot, 1 turnip, one teaspoonful cloves. Boil three or four hours, then strain through a colander. Add a little cornstarch, thicken and boil a few minutes longer. Serve with slices of lemon and hard-boiled egg.
This rich corn soup is not unlike Elizabeth Ellicott Lea’s Corn Fricassee. The flavor of the corn is front and center (or, depending on your palate and your corn, the soup is bland).
The attribution in “Maryland’s Way” is “Mrs. Murray’s Bride’s Book, 1858.“ It is possible the recipe is to be found somewhere within the voluminous Cheston-Galloway papers at the Maryland Historical Society. The collection encompasses many descendants of Samuel Galloway, a Maryland merchant and slave trader in the 1700s.
Galloway owned an estate, Tulip Hill, in Anne Arundel County. His son James Cheston would build Ivy Neck nearby on the Rhode River in 1787. The homes remained within their large and tangled family tree for many generations.
Mrs. Murray was born Mary Hollingsworth Morris somewhere down that family tree, at an intersection of cousins Anne Cheston and Dr. Caspar Morris. Tracing family connections demonstrates the many ties between Baltimore and Philadelphia families, and Philly is where the Morris family resided before settling at Ivy Neck, on the Rhode River in Anne Arundel County.
In 1844 the Morrises signed documents to gradually manumit all of the people that they had enslaved there. Four years later, Dr. Morris wrote a biography of abolitionist Margaret Mercer, an Anne Arundel County neighbor who worked with the controversial American Colonization Society.
In Dr. Morris’ biography, he credits Mercer with influencing another local enslaver, Daniel Murray Esquire, to release his slaves. Murray then joined the efforts of the Colonization Society. There is still a county in Liberia named Maryland, a vestige of this attempt to “resettle” people who had in most cases become naturalized to North American culture and terrain.
It was Murray’s son, Henry M. Murray, who married Mary Hollingsworth Morris in 1856. The family lived at Ivy Neck, perhaps with Mary’s “bride’s book,” but also with the help of servants, many of whom were probably the same people manumitted by Mary’s parents. The Ivy Neck property has two different tenant houses, one of which was home to a man named Daniel Boston who cooked for the Murray’s daughter Cornelia and her family at Ivy Neck in the 1930s.
The house at Ivy Neck burned down in 1944, and part of the property eventually went to the Smithsonian Chesapeake Bay Center for Environmental Studies.
Well, there you have it, “Fresh Garden Corn Chowder.”
Shuck corn and remove silk, then grate corn off the cob into the soup pot; add milk and heat slowly. Beat egg yolks and work the soft butter into them; add a little of the hot corn and milk mixture to egg and butter, beating well; then stir this into the soup. Add salt, sugar and a dash of pepper and bring to a simmer. Serve hot with chopped chives and paprika.
Recipe adapted from “Maryland’s Way”, “Mrs. Murray’s Bride’s Book, 1858”
In an attempt to jump-start the camping season, we headed to Green Ridge last weekend. The March weather opened up just enough time for two nights of campfire life, with a long walk on the C & O Canal and of course a hearty campfire dinner one night.
The Flag House still exists as the Star-Spangled Banner Flag House but sadly the 1840 house closed in 1997 and is now a bed & breakfast.
The City Life Museums encompassed the Phoenix Shot Tower, Carroll Mansion, H. L. Mencken House, Fava Fruit Company, Brewer’s Park, and the John Hutchinson House (a.k.a. The 1840 House.) Hutchinson was a wheelwright who lived in the home from 1835 to 1840 with his wife, three children, two boarders and an African American servant. Reenactors presented scripted dramas in different rooms of the house, providing visitors with a glimpse of the daily life and concerns during this tumultuous time in Baltimore.
Originally from Arkansas,
Latini got into hearth cooking after retiring from the Naval Academy. While
volunteering at the 1840 house she learned about hearth cooking – and taught
others in turn.
In addition to recipes, her
book offers some hearth cooking tips and some background on the Colonial
American diet. I’ve earmarked several recipes for future camp trips.
For once I didn’t cop-out and
use the little enameled dutch oven, and instead used my cast iron, and the
tripod. The afternoon offered a reminder of how laborious and slow of a process
cooking once was – how much effort was spent lifting, sweating and waiting.
Still, there is something calming and meditative about cooking over a fire or a
hearth. And there is an extra relaxing
sigh of relief when you can sit back afterwards and watch while the fire lives
on, and not have to worry about controlling it.
Recipe:
2 tablespoons butter
1 large onion, finely chopped
several sprigs of thyme
4 medium sized potatoes, diced
½ teaspoon pepper sauce (I did not have this so I used some
jalapenos I diced up and put in in vinegar the night before)
12 carrots, finely diced
6 cups soup stock
2 bay leaves
½ teaspoon sugar
2 Cups milk
1 cup cream
½ teaspoon salt
Black pepper
Melt the butter in large pot hung from a crane or tripod. Saute
the onion in butter and then add the diced potatoes, carrots, stock, and bay
leaves. Cook until the vegetables are tender. Add cream, milk, thyme, pepper
sauce, sugar, salt, and pepper and heat to boiling*. Remove the bay leaves
before serving.
*The milk might curdle especially with the
vinegar! It still tastes good but you can prevent it if you’re finicky.
