Amy Rosenkrans and I stood outside of the Woman’s Industrial Exchange building at 333 North Charles, looking at the artwork in the window. In 2020, the iconic but neglected 200-year-old building had been given to the Maryland Women’s Heritage Center. The inside was now filled with stories of Maryland suffragists, scientists, and leaders. The window showcased the wooden artworks of Paula Darby, the latest artist in a rotation of women artists put on display facing the hustle and bustle of Charles Street.
Layne Bosserman opened the front door towards us and announced “I found something.”
Although I was theoretically making my way out of the building, I couldn’t resist ducking back in to see Bosserman splaying several manila folders onto a table. Inside the first was a document thanking Julia Roberts for dining at the Exchange. There were several papers regarding charity events, an old photograph of the building, and a typewritten list of the Board of Directors. Most excitingly for my purposes were several menus. A luncheon featuring the Woman’s Exchange Tea Room’s famous tomato aspic and chicken salad platter, hot rolls, lemon tarts, and pumpkin pie. Some breakfast specials: eggs and bacon, homemade biscuits, assorted juices, “petite pancakes,” coffee cake, and peach upside-down cake. Most items could be had for under a dollar.
A small room on the second floor is full of these documents. In boxes and cabinets, and a great deal of disarray, they provide glimpses into the many lives that passed through the Woman’s Industrial Exchange over its century-long operation.
“I’d never been in this room when I worked here,” Bosserman said of the glorified closet. Standing in the hallway, she pointed at another door, now an apartment, “that was our changing room. Everyone had their cubby,” she explained. She and the other waitresses would change into their light-blue starched uniforms each day to work in the diner, which served many regulars. Bosserman was the youngest waitress working alongside Woman’s Exchange Tea Room elders Charlotte Zimernack, Trish Hall, and cashier Mrs. Phyllis Sanders. When Bosserman began her career as a librarian, it was with letters of recommendation from customers at the exchange, including Senator Julian Lapides and librarian John Sondheim.
That career now has her organizing ephemera from the place she once worked, stirring up memories and things no one else remembers.
Rosenkrans flipped through a pile of framed posters for annual Flower Marts. She showed me an early 1900s news article pasted onto a board, one of the earliest printed images of the Tea Room. Rosenkrans’ research work involves scouring not only the piles of documents in the storage room but old newspapers and other sources, as she orders the Exchange’s history into spreadsheets and folders.
A few nights before, I’d watched Rosenkrans present a Baltimore Heritage tour group with the history of the exchange.
I learned that it had initially been spun off from the phenomenon of “Confederate relief” societies that served to aid (white) women whose circumstances had been affected by the war. The Woman’s Industrial Exchange grew into something more, eventually enabling many women to gain financial independence. Other similar exchanges existed. Amy found evidence of one in Hagerstown. In segregated Baltimore, the Colored Women’s Industrial Exchange operated at 508 W Hoffman Street.
Women came to the exchange not only to sell handmade goods, but to learn skills like cooking and sewing. And of course, the famous tea room took on a life of its own. As Rosenkrans showed slides of celebrities like Katherine Hepburn who’d dined at the exchange, people ooh’d and aaah’d. Many nodded at the familiar shots of the Sleepless in Seattle scenes filmed in the tea room.
When she polled attendees as to who themselves had dined there, arms shot up. I seemed to be in the minority with my hands at my side.
After my meeting with Amy Rosenkrans and Bosserman, I revisited some of my prior research into the Woman’s Industrial Exchange and swapped notes with Rosenkrans. I found recipes belonging to some of the women involved in the
Exchange over the years. Rosenkrans has also found overlap between her research on the Exchange and another project she is involved in, researching the history of the Johns Hopkins Colored Orphans Asylum. Some women served on the board of both. With ample wealth and servants to see to their cooking and cleaning “these women had a lot of time on their hands,” she pointed out. And they kept busy.
Although the history of the Woman’s Industrial Exchange has been touched on in many articles and in books like “Maryland’s Vanishing Lives,” which profiled longtime waitress Margeurite Schertle, the history has never been gathered and organized on the scale that Rosenkrans is currently working. There are no imminent plans for a book or anything like that. The priority currently is to just dig and dig and sort and preserve.
“The Baltimore Woman’s Industrial Exchange is a Baltimore icon. It may be best remembered for the chicken salad or the sock monkeys but more importantly, it was a century-old institution that empowered women. Recovering and writing its history is essential to understanding the history of Baltimore itself,” Rosenkrans explained.
From the cookbook authors like Mrs. E. J. Strasburg, who sold her “Maryland Cook Book” at the Exchange in 1903, to the later artisans whose afghans and sock monkeys earned them a living, to the waitresses like the legendary Schertle, and Bosserman and her coworkers, the Woman’s Exchange is to Rosenkrans what a cookbook is to me: a collection of names, clues, and stories to tell.
Recipes:
Recipes for Woman’s Industrial Exchange tomato aspic, chicken salad, and deviled eggs appear in Shelley Howell’s 2018 book “Dining Down Memory Lane.” Howell scoured newspapers and the internet for recipes from Baltimore’s beloved bygone restaurants. I followed the aspic recipe the most faithfully. I kind of went my own way on the chicken salad, swapping out a more-flavorful whole chicken for the chicken breasts and adding some additional seasoning. I also prefer the taste of dill relish to store-bought sweet relish so I used that in the deviled eggs. I am sharing my own recipes here instead of those published in Howell’s book, which is available for purchase.
Tomato Aspic:
- 4 cups tomato juice
- 1 yellow onion, roughly chopped
- 2 stalks celery, roughly chopped
- 6 sprigs of parsley
- juice of 1/2 lemon
- 1 tb sugar
- 1 bay leaf
- 3 cloves
- tsp black peppercorns
- 2 packets of gelatin
Combine tomato juice and all other ingredients except gelatin in a pot and bring to a boil. Simmer for 30-40 minutes.
Bloom the gelatin in 1/2 cup of cool water. Strain the solids out of the tomato juice and discard. Stir gelatin into tomato juice until well combined. Pour into lightly oiled mold or multiple molds. (I used mini bundt pans). Chill for several hours, until firm. To remove, dip mold bottom into warm water and then flip onto a serving tray or onto a sheet pan and use a spatula to serve.
Recipe adapted from “Dining Down Memory Lane” by Shelley Howell, where it was adapted from Saveur
Chicken Salad:
- 1 small chicken , 3-4 lbs
- 1.5 c celery, minced
- 1/4 a small onion or a shallot, grated
- 1 cup mayonnaise
- 1 Tb seasoning. I used Hercules and Hemings Kitchen Pepper
- salt, pepper to taste
Submerge chicken in well-salted water. If it came with the giblets, add them to the water. I also added the discarded vegetables and peppercorns from the tomato aspic recipe. Boil until chicken is fully cooked, 180°. Remove from water.
When chicken is cool enough to handle, remove skin. Discard or save for other use (same with the giblets you boiled). Remove all meat from the chicken. If the pieces are big, chop them into bite sized pieces. Season well with your seasonings and blend with mayonnaise, celery, and onion & onion juice. Add additional mayonnaise if needed. Allow several hours in the refrigerator for the flavors to meld before serving.
Deviled Eggs:
- 6 eggs, hard-boiled
- 1 heaping tb dill relish or finely minced homemade pickle
- 1 tsp mustard
- 1 tsp honey
- salt & pepper to taste
- optional: maggi or other similar seasoning
- mayonnaise
- smoked paprika or chipotle powder
Peel eggs, slice in half and remove yolks to a bowl. Mash and combine with other ingredients. Add mayonnaise until you reach desired texture. Fill egg whites and top with paprika.
Recipe adapted from “Dining Down Memory Lane” by Shelley Howell. Exchange chef Rozz DuPree provided the recipe, which uses sweet relish and honey mustard
