western maryland Archives - Page 2 of 2

Deer Steak a.k.a. Venison

December 7, 2016January 13, 2019

“If it wasn’t seafood it had to be venison which filled the larders of early settlers of Maryland.” – Geoff Fielding, Maryland magazine 1990

While oysters once captured the imagination and the economy of Maryland, the abundance of game played a vital role in keeping families fed. Deer, in particular, could provide a supply of meat well after domestic animals had been ‘harvested’ for the winter.

Even without the need for sustenance, hunting has been a popular past-time in Maryland. Sporty Theodore Roosevelt types would visit exclusive clubs where game was managed – and sometimes released into the wild – for the express purpose of hunting. Afterward, the hunters could retreat by the fireside in a luxurious lodge for fine food and of course liquor.

The Woodmont Rod & Gun Club in Western Maryland was only one such resort. Someone from that club contributed three recipes to “Eat, Drink & Be Merry in Maryland”: “English Pheasants,” “Wild Turkey,” and “Venison.”

Although it’s not as ubiquitous now, it’s still pretty likely that if you live in some of the more rural areas of the state, someone is trying to unload some deer meat on you this time of year.

Firearm season for white-tailed deer only lasts two weeks from Thanksgiving through mid-December, but the deer are quite abundant without other predators left.

Last year, during the combined archery, muzzleloader and firearm seasons, hunters harvested 84,022 deer. I recall a family friend from the Eastern Shore, out at a restaurant one February, excitedly ordering a steak, lamenting “I’m so tired of eating deer meat!”

Luckily for me, I don’t eat steak or deer enough to feel strongly about it. Recently when visiting family in Shady Side, I welcomed any cuts handed to me from a neighbor’s chest freezer that was piled high with game, dry-aged and vacuum sealed. For some, the sport and the culinary acumen go hand in hand.

Queen of the Kitchen, Miss M. L. Tyson

Most venison recipes are pretty similar. The main thing is the addition of fats to compensate for the leanness compared to domesticated meats.

The Woodmont Rod & Gun Club prescribes olive oil, butter, and grated onion. Miss M. L. Tyson recommends constant basting with butter. Some recipes include currant jelly.

Infuriatingly, the updated recipe in the “Maryland Gourmet” column in Maryland magazine has a caption that says they used beef steak!

*shake your fist at this*

So I just winged it. High heat in a skillet, bacon grease, frequent turning (yep), butter, deglazing the pan with a little wine after. It turned out great except that I should have cut the ring of fat from around the edge before cooking; it didn’t contribute much. (For me anyway. My dog disagrees.)

Every meat-eating Marylander should sidle up to a hunter. One man’s reprieve is another’s repast.

Recipe:

Heat skillet hot. Cut off the ring of fat from around the deer steak. Season with salt and pepper, etc. and immediately cook in hot grease, turning frequently. The internet says to cook it to 140°, I did about that and still managed a juicy interior – do not overcook.

Apple Butter

October 18, 2016January 13, 2019

“Being at the house of a good old German friend in Pennsylvania, in September last, we noticed upon the table what was called apple butter; and finding it an agreeable article, we inquired into the modus operandi in making it, which we give for the gratification of such in New England as may wish to enjoy the luxury of Pennsylvania apple butter.” – Poughkeepsie Journal, NY 1838

Again, we turn to Elizabeth Ellicott Lea for guidance on preserving the harvest. Apple butter, Wikipedia will tell you, originated in Germany and the Netherlands, and has been a popular way to preserve the apple harvest in the U.S. since Colonial times. The spread is considered a Pennsylvania Dutch specialty. Lea’s cooking has a lot of overlap with the Pennsylvania Dutch, so unsurprisingly she has two recipes -or “ways”- in “Domestic Cookery.”

One of her recipes, “[Apple Butter] Another Way” prescribes the use of a huge kettle, where cider is reduced and apples are boiled in it for hours, while constantly stirred with “a stick made of hickory wood, somewhat like a common hoe, with holes in it.”

Jackson’s Orchard, flickr

This considerable undertaking became a family or even a neighborhood communal effort. The scene at the modern-day Berkeley Springs Apple Butter Festival in WV is not all that different. Every year, people gather in the town square and labor over the hot cauldrons as the smell wafts around the bustling town.

Apple butter seems particularly primed to evoke feelings pure and nostalgic for people in this region.

Advertisement, 1923

This is, of course, the part where I mention that it hasn’t always been that great. I found at least two instances where a young child died from falling into the boiling vat.

Additionally, many who ate apple butter were killed as a result of primitive canning technology.

Before the widespread use of glass jars for canning, it was common to “put up” various preserves in earthen vessels. These vessels often contained a poisonous glaze that was corroded by acidic foods like apple butter, with deadly results. Elizabeth Lea cautions about this in her other apple butter recipe, entitled “Apple Butter. With Remarks on the Use of Earthen Vessels.” This recipe is a little more user-friendly, with no need for a vat or a hickory stick. She even mentions that if you cannot finish the apple butter in a day, you can put it in a tub to continue the next day. I opted to put mine in the slow cooker when I needed to step away.

The farmers market is awash with apples right now. It’s overwhelming. I was going to ask one of the friendly vendors for advice on a good apple-butter apple but I saw that Lewis Orchards was selling a mixed crate of ugly apples (and the odd pear) and figured that was the way to go. Not all apples broke down at the same rate but I eventually got them all into submission.

Some recipes use cider. Others, like the recipe in “300 Years of Black Cooking in St. Mary’s County,” use vinegar. I opted to use a blend of hard and fresh cider.

The lovely aroma did indeed fill me with nostalgia for Berkeley Springs, campfires, and ‘jacket weather.’ It also filled me with anticipation for grilled cheese, barbecue sauce, and scrapple sandwiches.

Recipe:

“Have your kettle well cleaned, and fill it early in the morning with cider made of sound apples, and just from the press; let it boil half away, which may be done by three o’clock in the afternoon; have pared and cut enough good apples to fill the kettle; put them in a clean tub, and pour the boiling cider over; then scour the kettle and put in the apples and cider, let them boil briskly till the apples sink to the bottom; slacken the fire and let them stew, like preserves, till ten o’clock at night. Some dried quinces stewed in cider and put in are an improvement. Season with orange peel, cinnamon or cloves, just before it is done; if you like it sweeter, you can put in some sugar an hour before it is done. If any thing occur that you cannot finish it in a day, pour it in a tub, and finish it the next day; when it is done put it in stone jars. Any thing acid should not be put in earthen vessels, as the glazing is poisonous. This way of making apple butter requires but little stirring; you must keep a constant watch that it does not burn.

Pears and peaches may be done in the same way, and if they are sweet,
will not require sugar.”

Recipe from “Domestic cookery, useful receipts, and hints to young housekeepers” by Elizabeth Ellicott Lea

Braised Duckling Bigarrade, Fort Cumberland Hotel

May 20, 2016January 13, 2019

This is another recipe from the glamorous hotel era – this time from Cumberland, Maryland. At the time of the publication of “Eat, Drink & Be Merry in Maryland” in the 1930s, Cumberland was a booming town connecting the rest of Maryland to the west, particularly mineral-rich western Maryland, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Trains, the National Road, and the C&O Canal moved freight and people from DC & Baltimore through this mountain town, and many of those people expected to wine and dine in style just as they had in Baltimore and on the train-ride itself.

To that end, the Fort Cumberland Hotel was built in 1916. This “typical small city hotel” offered middle-class residents of western Maryland a chance to feast on Sunday dinners of “Filet of Sole Au Vin Blanc,” “String Beans Au Beurre,” and yes, “Chicken A La Maryland.”

Early advertisements boasted the hotel as “fireproof,” a legitimate concern for the times but amusing and baffling today. The hotel ultimately did experience a fire in 1952 but it was minor, and the Cumberland Times reported that “no panic ensued.”

The Fort Cumberland Hotel was visited by no less than future President Harry Truman during a 1928 journey to dedicate twelve “Madonna of the Trail” monuments along the “National Old Trails Road.”

trumanlibrary.org

Digging into the past of hotel manager Ivan Poling, who shared this recipe with Frederick Phillip Stieff, provides some more damning evidence (if the racist cartoons weren’t enough) on Stieff’s character – if this is the company he kept. A businessman from a family involved in the coal business and then the hotel trade, Poling was the owner or manager of many hotels throughout Maryland and his home state of West Virginia. A news item from Fairmont, WV in 1924 indicates that Poling was almost certainly a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He was fined $500 for his part in a conspiracy to kidnap and batter a black man suspected of making advances on a white woman. Several of the other people charged were “officials” in the Klan. It is unusual that this incident made it into the news at that place and time – there is no way of knowing how he conducted himself thereafter. Upon his death in 1948, Cumberland obituaries recalled his “genial personality and friendly interest in people.”

Today the Fort Cumberland Hotel is a senior’s home. The population of Cumberland peaked in 1940 and has been steadily declining since. Perhaps some of the seniors living there can remember the time when the hotel offered another luxurious stop for the wealthy, and the town of Cumberland was bustling not just with wealthy travelers, but with the chefs and waiters, miners, and factory workers who made their lavish lifestyle possible.

Recipe:

1 duckling
carrots
onion
celery
butter or lard
½ cup currant jelly
stock
2 oranges
1 lemon
flour

Brown whole duckling, along with carrots, onion and celery in a saucepan with lard or butter. Sprinkle with a little flour and cook until the flour is well browned; add some tomato puree and stock, cover the pan and put in moderate oven until the duckling is well done. Remove the duck from the sauce and stir in a cupful of currant jelly and the juice of two oranges and one lemon. Peel strips off of the orange and lemon peel and boil until tender. Add them to gravy, serve over the duck and garnish with quartered orange.

Notes:

Although I adapted these instructions slightly (for legal reasons), they were equally vague in the original. I had no idea how much of anything to use. I got the duck at Potung. There are lots of kinds of duck and the one I bought is probably quite different from those served in Maryland in the early 1900s. This recipe is available online in more decipherable details.

Maryland Maple Butter & Biscuits

February 25, 2016March 2, 2020

“A Maryland specialty is producing edibles that enhance some other state’s reputation. Nobody ever hears of Maryland maple syrup, or Maryland country hams or Maryland ducklings, although the State sends forth its share. All the world hears about, from Portland to Pakistan is what is passed off as Maryland fried chicken and which often proves a fowl play on Maryland’s cooking talents.” – The Sun, 1962

Last weekend I visited Oregon Ridge Nature Center for a muddy/snowy hike and a glimpse at the annual Maple Sugaring.

Oregon Ridge is a historic site in Baltimore County. The majority of maple sugaring in the state, however, occurs westward.

I tend to neglect the western region of our state, but the panhandle has at times boasted its own share of resources to rival that of the Eastern Shore. Although I probably won’t be following Zaidee Browning’s recipe for bear steaks any time soon, Western Maryland is also the home to a robust dairy industry, an assortment of wild game, forageable delicacies, and maple syrup.

“A letter from Grantsville, Garrett County, MD, says that the manufacture of maple sugar in that county is developing very rapidly. Sugar trees are abundant throughout the country and there are thousands of trees that have never been tapped. Each farmer has his ‘sugar camp,’ and in the season from the first of February until the first of April all hands are busy boiling sugar and syrup, each producing from 2000 to 4000 pounds.” – The Sun, Baltimore 1881

In 1893, an article appeared in many national newspapers revealing that the maple sugar from Maryland had tested as higher quality than sugar from Vermont. The Maryland Maple Syrup industry started to gain more attention in the 1920’s, and remained highly profitable, especially during WWII when sugar was rationed. Around this time, maple syrup recipes appeared frequently in syndicated news columns.

While I’m not a connoisseur, I seek out Maryland maple syrup when I do buy maple syrup. Considering it’s versatile uses for baking, marinades, sweets and dressings I’d like to start reaching for it more often.

I followed Martha Stewart’s recipe for Maple Butter. This caramel-like spread is great to have around when I want a sweet snack (which is often.)

1946 Baltimore Sun

I chose a simple biscuit recipe from “300 Years of Black Cooking In St. Mary’s County” to accompany the maple butter. The recipe was contributed to the book by Lucille Briscoe of Charlotte Hall.

I had a hard time finding any information about Lucille (that I could verify.) The Briscoe name hails from Sotterley Plantation owner Dr. Walter Hanson Stone Briscoe, passed on to the people he’d enslaved upon their emancipation. This is typical, and all around the region you can find unrelated families with names linking them to the place of their ancestors enslavement. The SlackWater Archive contains oral histories of people with the name of Briscoe, as well as histories of the slavery experience at Sotterley Plantation.

I either rolled the biscuits too thin or overworked the dough because they didn’t come out looking very biscuit-like, in the American sense of the word. They were perfectly tasty and flaky and made an ideal vehicle for the maple butter. I had some leftover crème fraîche so I dabbed a little of that on there too. In the photo at the bottom of this entry, the butter was spread onto a hot biscuit and is melting. The top photo shows the texture out of the fridge. It’s a little grainy. I believe that could be prevented by mixing in about a tablespoon of corn syrup to the maple syrup when heating. I don’t find that necessary, it still tastes fine.

Maple Butter:

1 cup real maple syrup
1 cinnamon stick
¾ cup unsalted butter, cut into pieces

Pour maple syrup into a medium saucepan, add cinnamon stick. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Cook to 240 degrees, or when syrup is thick like hot caramel, 10 to 15 minutes. Remove the pan from heat, remove cinnamon stick*, and stir in butter until melted.

Transfer mixture to the bowl of an electric mixer, beat on low speed until mixture is thick, creamy and stiffening. Store in an airtight container, refrigerated, for up to 2 weeks.

Martha Stewart recipe

Biscuit Recipe:

3 c flour
3 tsp baking powder
2 tsp salt
⅓ c shortening
1 c buttermilk

Sift together dry ingredients. Cut in shortening. Stir in the milk until all ingredients are moistened. Roll dough out to ½” thickness on a lightly floured surface. Cut into biscuit rounds and place onto greased baking sheet. Bake at 425 for 15-20 minutes, until lightly browned.

Recipe adapted from “300 Years of Black Cooking in St. Mary’s County”, credited to Lucille Briscoe, Charlotte Hall

Vanilla Butternut (Pound) Cake

November 20, 2015April 4, 2019

Mid-century food has been a running fascination/source of mockery since the early days of the internet. Even before the widespread popularization of organic, homegrown ingredients, people had largely turned away from the technicolor kitchen adventurism found in old recipe cards.

A few weeks ago there was a New York Times article addressing what I have referred to on this site as “mid-century peculiarities” about food and cooking.

“The women of the Women’s Education Association badly wanted the sacrosanct light of science to illuminate women’s work — done in the kitchen — with an emphasis on what was replicable, observable, gradable and expressive of human dominance over and mastery of nature. “ – Betty Crocker’s Absurd, Gorgeous Atomic-Age Creations by Tamar Adler, New York Times

The article generated a moderate amount of buzz. As far as I can tell, the real story lies somewhere between the grandiose claims and the somewhat joyless rebuttals.

Much like those two extremes, we often fall on similar “either/or” dichotomies when it comes to food in culture. “Local, fresh and organic” may fit the general modern notion of purity in food, but not too long ago ‘purity’ meant the exact opposite. The “suffocating sanitizing” actually dates back further than the age of Betty Crocker and it stemmed from a legitimate need to escape spoilage and contamination.

What gets lost in all of this is any kind of nuance or fluidity. Take my great-grandmother for instance; she fished, she farmed… and she made “Vanilla Butternut Cake.”

Tied to the cap of the bottle found in the cabinets of every member of my family is the recipe for this easy and delicious pound cake. While it may not have the panache of shrimp enshrined in green Jell-O or potato salad pressed into loaf form, the central ingredient in the cake is unmistakably from the past.

The origin story on the North Carolina-based Superior Flavors’ website makes little attempts to obscure their products’ lab-grown origins. The explanation is that the line of flavors were simply invented by chemist Jerry Fox in the 1930s for his wife Violet.

A few years ago my aunt took the effort to make sure our supplies were replenished, and for Christmas she gave each family member their own bottle of Superior “Vanilla, Butter & Nut” flavoring along with a copy of the recipe. She reminisced about my great-grandmother making this cake around the holidays, how heavenly it smelled, and she noted that one bottle might well last a lifetime.

In chef Sean Brock’s book “Heritage” he included a recipe for Velveeta fudge, wryly noting that for him, Velveeta was a ‘heritage ingredient.’ As it turns out, “Imitation Vanilla, Butter & Nut Flavoring” is a heritage ingredient for my family.

It was only when I began to write this entry that I came to realize that this cake recipe isn’t as ubiquitous as I’d assumed. The flavoring can’t be found in most grocery stores (although substitutes exist), and the origin of the recipe and even the company were hard to locate.

When I searched old newspapers for the pound cake recipe, Maryland had the most results. Even Superior Flavors’ home-state of North Carolina didn’t offer any clues.

The recipe was making the rounds here in Maryland papers in the 1970s, particularly Western Maryland, near where my Great Grandmother was from.

Two different people won the same cooking contest in different years with this cake, first in 1973 and then in 1977. The contest in question had the oh-so-challenging restriction that the recipes must contain… eggs.

Now that I know that “Vanilla Butternut Cake” isn’t as common as say, green-bean casserole, I will probably bake it more often. It lacks the glorious kitsch of neon aspics, and the spiritual gravitas of hand-preserved garden harvests, but it fits quite nicely into real life.

Recipe:

1.5 cups sugar
.25 cups Crisco
1 stick of butter
pinch of salt
2 eggs
1.5 cups flour
.5 cups evaporated milk
2 tsp vanilla-butter-nut flavoring

Cream together shortening, butter, sugar and salt. Beat in eggs one at a time. Alternately add in flour & milk, ending with flour. Fold in flavoring by hand. Pour into a greased tube or bundt pan. Place in cold oven, turn oven on to 325°. Bake for one hour & 45 minutes. Don’t peek! Remove from pan immediately.

★ I once made this cake using 1/3 coconut flour & adding extra milk (per coconut flour instructions) and it was excellent!