A reader once contacted me, asking “why there were so many recipes labeled with Maryland?” She included an example in her email – a recipe for “Maryland Cream Waffles.”
I hadn’t heard of Maryland Cream Waffles before, so I went to my database. The first thing I found was a recipe in Mrs. B. C. Howard’s “Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen,” for “Cream Waffles (Made In A Moment).”
In Howard’s recipe, saleratus interacts with soured cream for leavening while egg whites are beaten separately for additional air in the waffles.
Later recipes swap out baking powder for the saleratus and often use fresh cream or milk, but the formula didn’t change much, even as it was printed and reprinted in newspapers from the 1910s through the 1990s.
Before there were ethical questions about organic vegetables, GMOs or factory farming, American consumers were faced with the ultimate ethical consumption conflict: slavery.
As we have seen with the issue of baking powder, regional and cultural adoption of foods was sometimes influenced by commitment to the abolitionist movement. While this can mean an aversion to the labor involved in making the food, as with beaten biscuits, it can also mean the labor involved in growing the ingredients, as with sugar or rice.
Rice made its way to this continent along with the enslaved West African people whose ancestors had domesticated and cultivated it thousands of years earlier.
1871 Baltimore Sun
In 1648, a pamphlet on Virginia (published for the interest of the English in London) reported that governor “Sir William” [Berkeley] procured rice and ordered it to be sown in Virginia, where “it prospered gallantly.”
More rice was planned to be sown the following year, “for we perceive the ground and climate is very proper for it as our negroes affirm, which in their country is most of their food, and very healthful for our bodies.”
While growing rice as additional subsistence for family or for better financial autonomy is one thing, growing rice for commercial trade is another altogether. David Shields’ “Southern Provisions” quotes an 1853 account of Carolina slaves engaged in the process of farming rice. Working in “gangs” of around 20 people, the enslaved not only sowed and harvested the rice, but performed extensive irrigation and land preparation. Failure to meet work quotas or comply was enforced with whippings and solitary confinement.
The Chesapeake region may not have had rice culture to this extent, but rice was certainly grown in the 1600′s through 1800′s. The 1860 agricultural census has a column for pounds of rice produced by farming households. According to Barbara Wells Sarudy in “Gardens and Gardening in the Chesapeake”, sixteenth-century planter John Beale Boardley touted the rice harvested in the loamy Annapolis-area soil as being “preferred to the best imported rice.”
Rice dishes certainly proliferated in Maryland cookbooks in the mid-to-late 1800s, with over a dozen recipes for rice waffles alone. For this post, I worked with a recipe from the 1897 “Up-to-Date Cookbook” via “Maryland’s Way”. Some recipes use rice flour or pulverize the cooked rice into the batter, but this one did not. Once again, authenticity went out the window in my ‘low-waste’ kitchen – in this case I used leftover wild rice. In 1897, the rice in question might have been something similar to the Carolina Gold rice profiled in great depth in “Southern Provisions.”
Even as rice cultivation in Maryland waned in favor of tobacco or corn, the Confederate-leaning Marylanders like cookbook author Jane Gilmor Howard may have had less ethical concerns about the consumption of the rice that was being transported by train from the South. Although she came from an abolitionist Quaker family, Elizabeth Ellicott Lea featured sixteen rice recipes in her cookbook “Domestic Cookery.” She may have had access to regionally grown rice, or perhaps she consumed with moral conflict.
Recipe:
2 Cups flour
.5 Teaspoon salt
.5 Teaspoon baking soda
2 eggs
2 Cups buttermilk
.5 Cup cooked rice
1 Tablespoon melted butter, plus more for cooking
Sift together flour, salt and soda. Beat egg yolks and add to buttermilk. Add rice and butter. Combine buttermilk mixture with dry ingredients; then fold in well beaten egg whites. Bake in buttered waffle iron.
Recipe adapted from “Maryland’s Way, the Hammond-Harwood House Cookbook”
Back when I first made Maryland Fried Chicken for my blog, I became a target of some amusing internet vitriol. The authenticity police took one look at my fried chicken leg served atop a waffle and saw heresy.
Although the disdain seemed a bit over the top to me, I can understand the confusion at its core. I always thought of the chicken/waffle combination as a Southern dish, dispersed our way during the Great Migration.
Waffle suppers had in fact been a popular church dinner dating back to at least the mid-1800’s, and in Maryland, they often featured chicken or “frizzled beef” aka creamed chip beef.
1924 advertisement, Salisbury Daily Times
Carvel Hall Hotel manager Albert H. McCarthy had been a Maryland resident for at least 37 years by the time he prescribed that “Maryland Fried Chicken” be served atop a waffle in “Eat, Drink & Be Merry in Maryland” (1932, Frederick Phillip Stieff).
In fact, a lot of the times when waffle advertisements or recipes appear in 1930′s newspapers, a distinction is made when the subject is “dessert waffles.” Talbot County resident Miss Mary McDaniel’s recipe for “Chocolate Waffles”, also from Eat, Drink & Be Merry in Maryland, certainly falls into that category. It is the only waffle in that book containing more than a tablespoon of sugar.
Dutch immigrants brought waffles to North America in the 1700s, when they were cooked in an iron over an open fire. According to culinary historian Joyce White, cast iron waffle irons can be commonly found among the kitchen items in 18th and 19th-century probate inventories of taxable properties.
Waffle recipes varied regionally. In the South, sweet potato waffles became popular. Rice and corn were common frugal additions that also caught on in Maryland. All of the late 1800s Maryland cookbooks include multiple waffle varieties.
The first electric waffle irons hit the scene around 1911 and waffles became easier than ever to make. A Frederick Y.M.C.A. reported raising over $2000 (adjusted for inflation) from a waffle supper in 1913.
Advertisement, 1930
Waffles seem to have experienced another resurgence in popularity in the 1970s. Less than a half a century before, Aunt Jemima ads and the Aunt Priscilla column in the Baltimore Sun promoted racist associations with waffles. The imagery and language can be jarring. In 1975, Harlem native Herb Hudson founded Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles -arguably the most famous purveyor of the classic combination- in Los Angeles. Chicken & waffles’ soul food identity was being cemented – and reclaimed.
If you order a waffle in Maryland today, you are likely to be served a chewy and sweet thick waffle made from pancake batter. I confess to routinely settling for this at diners.
True waffles can be had from the specialists like Connie’s & Taste This. These places frequently offer different sweet varieties like red velvet for the salty sweet set. In this spirit, I decided to go ahead and have some well-salted & honey-slathered chicken with my chocolate waffle. Although I can see the appeal, corn or rice waffles will remain my preference. Savory waffles will go better with chip-beef or chicken with cream gravy.
I’d like to see the chip beef waffle make a resurgence. Everything old becomes new again. Hopefully when it does there will be someone lurking in the shadows, ready to fight a war on behalf of toast.
Recipe:
.5 Cup butter
2 Teaspoon baking powder
1 Cup sugar
1.5 Cup flour
2 egg
.5 Cup milk
.25 Teaspoon salt
2 oz melted chocolate
vanilla extract, to taste
Cream butter and sugar, then add well-beaten eggs. Sift together flour, baking powder, and salt. Gradually add flour to eggs, alternating with milk. Stir in chocolate and vanilla. Bake on hot waffle iron. “Serve with whipped cream or XXXX sugar.”
Recipe adapted from “Eat, Drink & Be Merry in Maryland”
This recipe comes from the “Maryland’s Way” cookbook via a “Mrs. Frederick W. Brune’s Book, 1860.” The source is likely the Brune Family Papers residing at the Maryland Historical Society. Other than delicious cornmeal waffles, the recipe led only to dead ends, with no real resolution or intrigue. There, I said it.
The Brune family legacy spans many generations in Baltimore, starting with the first Frederick W. Brune, a German who became a prominent Baltimore merchant after immigrating in 1799.
His son, and his son were also named Frederick W. Brune, so the whole thing gets confusing. Timing suggests this book belonged to the wife of Frederick W. Brune II, maiden name Emily S. Barton.
Frederick W. Brune II was a founding member of the Maryland Historical society (MDHS). His son Frederick W. Brune III was a president of MDHS, as well as chief judge in the Maryland Court of Appeals.
The “Confederate Waffles, Mrs. Hubard’s Way” mystery remains. I couldn’t figure out who Mrs. Hubard was, although there was a Confederate colonel who could have known the family through politics. The recipe is not labeled as “Confederate” in the family papers. It may have been an addition for publication in “Maryland’s Way.” An employee at MDHS was so kind as to look into the Brune family papers for me, adding that they do not know whether the Brunes were confederate sympathizers but “it seems likely, because if you were in rich in Baltimore..” The name could possibly be a play on the corn-based Johnnycakes, which originate in New England.
Well there you have it. Hopefully I’ll return next week with something a little more interesting.
Recipe:
1 cup corn meal
2 cups boiling water
4 tb butter (optional: use part bacon grease)
2 eggs, beaten
1 cup flour
½ tsp salt
3 tsp baking powder
2/3 cup milk
Stir cornmeal into boiling water until smooth. Add butter and stir until melted. Let cool before stirring in eggs, followed by flour, salt and baking powder. Thin with milk & pour batter into heated waffle iron.
Recipe adapted from “Maryland’s Way: The Hammond-Harwood House Cookbook”. Served above with berbere-spiced black-eyed pea fritters from “Afro-Vegan” by Bryant Terry
