Tuesday Talk November 2023 - Stories and Recipes from Maryland - Dining and Cooking (2024)

Well thank you all for joining us we appreciate you being here uh a couple housekeeping things for if you have not yet joined us on a webinar this is a webinar format so you don’t have to have your camera on or your microphone on if

You do have a question for carara I will be asking those to her at the end so you can use the Q&A feature to put in your questions for the speaker uh you’re welcome to use the chat function if you just agree with something she’s saying

Or you want to share a personal story with the rest of uh the audience uh but the questions for carot go in the Q&A box and you can continue to put where you’re from in the chat we’d love to know uh where everybody’s coming from and then a recording of This will be

Available at the end um I will edit it and then put it up on our YouTube page so welcome to the D Museum online I am Sarah kursell I’m the coordinator of Museum engagement and Outreach for the D Museum today we are going to hear from

Cara Harris and as a part this is a part of our monthly Tuesday talk lecture series presented on the second Tuesday of the month this Series highlights topics related to the D Museum collection from decorative Arts to American Social history to best practices and object preservation uh if

You’re interested in a full list of our upcoming programs and lectures you can visit our website at www.d.org Museum uh you can also follow us on Facebook or Instagram we have Family Programs Girl Scout programs uh symposia exhibitions uh evening events and more and so we encourage you if you’re in the

Area to go ahead and visit our exhibition called called pleasing truths the power and portrait power and portraits in the American home which will be up through the end of the year so you have a little bit of time left before our next exhibition opens in

March and so without further Ado I will introduce Cara Harris she has been researching and documenting Maryland recipes on her website Old Line plate since 2015 uh she’s been profiled in the Baltimore Sun The Washington Post and on CBS mornings uh her F forthcoming book profiles Mar celebrations from Community

Recipes from the 1870s to the 1970s uh so without further Ado Cara take it away hi thank you so much everyone for um bogging on today um I like to start off by thinking if you had to choose one recipe to contribute to a community cookbook what

Recipe would you choose would you choose something you make all the time or something for special occasions I might choose something that I’d got gotten the most compliments on um when you go to write down your recipe you have to make some choices I might imply I use only a

Certain quality of ingredients obviously I want to P put forth the best version of this dish after all or maybe I’d look at how much sugar or butter is in my recipe and think that you know that can’t be right maybe I’ll cut back a little if you’re a cook who improvises

You have to think about the process of writing down your recipe um by writing it down you’re deciding the one way the best version of your recipe who knows maybe one day your version could be considered the only authentic way to make your dish I study culinary history but my

Specialty is really the recipe and they’re not always the same thing especially the further you go back in history cookbooks and recipes have been around for centuries in different forms but in the 1800s there was a cookbook boom there’s a lot of different reasons or possible reasons for this um social

Changes like the end of slavery might have left some women without a knowledge of how to cook the idea of domestic science was on the Rise um you might have heard of Fanny Farmer here who popularized the concept of using standard measurements and recipes you also had social reformists who were

Pushing new ideas about nutrition the idea was spreading that it was a woman’s responsibility to feed her family nourishing food on the other end of the spectrum you have women like U Mrs Charles Gibson or Benjamin uh Mrs Benjamin 2 Howard here in Maryland after the Civil War

Their way of life was in Decline compiling books full of recipes was one way to continue the Nostalgia for the antab Bellum era um we to believe a time of good and plentiful food and Southern Hospitality also a lot of church groups publish books to benefit charity or even Social

Clubs overall I think that one of the primary drivers was just that it was a cool fun thing to do um think of social media showing off pictures of what we eat that’s what these books are like sometimes hundreds or even thousands of recipes in them as I started to collect

These books and attempt to recreate the dishes in them I soon learned that um they have some limitations many of the recipes were copied straight from other books and never tested or they were just printed to show off the author’s social status how much butter and sugar or hired or

Enslaved help she could afford um this recipe here was copied from Mary Randolph’s cook book into um Mrs Benjamin Chu Howard who I showed a few slides ago and as you can see she just copied the recipe word for word a lot of these old recipes also are

Really vague when they were written it was kind of assumed that cooks would have a certain amount of prior knowledge so recipes for baked goods might just list the amounts for ingredients and then say cook it in a slow oven um sometimes they wouldn’t even tell you to

Cook it at all um this is a dut recipe in the middle here that says wet it with milk into a light dough and set to Rise um with meat recipes I sometimes wonder why they even bothered a recipe for English meat pie called for any kind of

Cold meat with a rich gravy or butter for cooking raw meat they would just say stew it until done standard measurements consistent ovens or even having an oven at all didn’t become too widespread until the 20th century similarly there was more variation in the ingredients that the cooks would be using

Flour for instance I make Maryland recipes um and the kind of wheat used in allpurpose flour that we buy at the grocery store can’t even really be grown in Maryland so Millers and Bakers would create their own Blends depending on the purpose the flower could vary from Mill

To Mill household to household year to year the texture of someone’s bread could have been wildly different the same is true of yeast yeast would come from the air or from a byproduct of beer brewing there’s a lot of different kinds of yeast out there so the one kind we

Buy at the grocery store now of flour or Yeast is only representing a single possibility for this recipe we might have no idea what some ingredients used to taste like um pictured here is liquid yeast that I actually got from a local home brew group and they collected this

Yeast off of a tree so I attempted to make bread using a traditional wild yeast um you also may have read about lost or rare heirloom vegetables that we don’t see anymore um more recently I’ve become interested in extinct industrial ingredients in one cookbook that I have

I found a whole section dedicated to a product called Coraline it sounds like it was invented during some type of industrial accident happening when processing corn um from reading the patent it sounds like the dried corn was steamed while being miled and it came out in little curlicues and

Could just be cooked with water I think that the end effect was something similar to instant grits so when I tried to make a recipe from this cookbook I used instant grits but how historic are these muffins if the corn is different the flour is different my oven is

Different plus the instructions for this recipe just said to bake immediately still I’ve made hundreds of recipes at this point and I’ve indexed thousands of them into my recipe database so obviously I find some value in it I I think that even what people wanted to project their wealth their

Thrift or their skill um that can be interesting by comparing all these cookbooks over time you can see fads or the gradual adoption of Technology um at the turn of the century there’s a lot of chafing dishes uh chafing dish recipes in cookbooks or even cookbooks specifically for the

Chafing dish there might have been a time when both the chafing dish and the refrigerator seems like exciting new things that would just be around forever um I rarely even see uh chafing dishes in the thrift stores but at the turn of the century they were all the

Rage I also just love these Community cookbooks they all have their own personality uh people would add recipes in the margins or write changes to specific recipes every Church cookbook is a document full of names people who have Back stories and recipes that reflect Trends and Changing

Times the women who compiled these books were very marketing Savvy they also sold to local businesses and sometimes they Incorporated new ingredients essentially product placement baking powder is a good example because it was a huge new ingredient in the 1800s it revolutionized how people bake um some

People were wary of it being a dangerous chemical but then lots of Home economists put out cookbooks with reassurances that it was safe plus a bunch of tempting recipes before doing this research I used to think that the past was a little more free of commercial influence

But there’s really a fine line between a corporate cookbook and a community cookbook often the recipes were exchanged between the two here in Maryland um many Savvy recipe and cookbook authors also capitalized on Maryland’s Fame Maryland Food used to be famous Across the Western World allegedly one Baltimore caterer

Shipped his terapen soup to London deved crabs were popular as far as crabs could safely be shipped and possibly where they couldn’t canvas back duck was known far and wide people would come to Baltimore to eat these dishes Marilyn Fried Chicken used to be a standard for luxury hotels and

Railroads it was served aboard the Titanic um there’s actually recently an article about this um in which I was lucky enough to be interviewed on the BBC um not many people know what Marilyn Fried Chicken is anymore it’s generally Fried Chicken served with cream gravy but historically no one could ever agree

On exactly what it entailed some recipes called for it to be served on a waffle some recipes called for it to be served with fried mush or fritters or even steamed in the cooking process devil crab is kind of the Forerunner of the crab cake sometimes it has similar

Ingredients aside from oysters this was really the Pinnacle of Chesapeake food that people expected to get in Maryland and devil crabs were popular right up through the 1950s when crab meat was industrially um picked usually around chrisfield on Maryland’s Eastern Shore it was often shipped with the shells so that it could

Be served in this way crab cakes have been around since the 1700s in some form or other but they didn’t really become so popular until the whole Maryland fine dining Mystique was starting to fade in the 1950s um beaten biscuits came to be associated with Maryland um they were invented in a time

Before baking powder so it took 30 to 45 minutes of beating the dough to aate it the oldest known recipe appears in Mary Randolph’s Virginia housewife cookbook um some people Associated these with slavery because the labor involved and um one cookbook author published a recipe for them but also declare them unfit to

Eat terapin was generally served as soup sometimes with a cream sauce this is um Mrs J Miller TOS first lady of Maryland um in her kitchen preparing ter p and she actually put out a cookbook in the 1960s that includes a lot of her Maryland recipes um the population of terapin

Became threatened but the popularity of eating them was actually already declining um because of this or maybe just the weirdness of boiling Turtles imitation terapen dishes have been around since the 1800s as well many versions involve a Cav’s head I haven’t tried that I did try a version that just uses

Chicken um there’s a theory that prohibition caused the decline of terapin soup because the soup was often served with a splash of Sherry at the end um I actually don’t agree with this um for one thing many epicures including Frederick Philip Steve who compiled a book in the 1930s full of famous

Maryland recipes he declared that Sher Sherry ruined the soup um for another there was a pretty good amount of liquor available to High Society during prohibition um Baltimore in particular had a lot of people with really huge sellers around the holidays they would serve one of two rivaling drinks eggnog

Or apple totty we all know what eggnog is I think Baltimore versions sometimes contain Madera wine allegedly because of it being a port town with all this wine and rum coming in abatti is a very old and very potent beverage made by infusing rye whiskey with roasted apples and spices and it’s

Sometimes aged up to a year year and people used to put out bowls of these Libations um throughout the holidays from pretty much Thanksgiving through New Year’s so they would be made in huge quantities now when we think of sophisticated cooking today we often think of chefs working out of

Restaurants that mostly wasn’t the case in the 19th and early 20th century professional chefs were referred to as Caterers and they often worked out of Baltimore’s famous hotels like the Emerson the Southern and the badier they also served Social Club and private homes and famous events like the

Bachelor’s catian this is the Maryland club which had a famous Feast featuring terapin canvas back duck and a lot of the other foods that I just mentioned and it would have been served by Caterers um the catering industry was comprised primarily of black families who kind of built dynasties on this food

And in segregated Baltimore it enabled some families to accumulate wealth and Prestige um but there’s kind of a lot of complexity in the way way that they were portrayed and um appeared in the food culture in 1917 an author named Julian Street wrote about his travels around the country he

Wrote a lot about his stay in Baltimore he came in through Penn Station he visited lexan Market he stayed at the badier hotel he shopped on Antique Row um as he approached the city he wrote my first real view of Baltimore was my first Glimpse over the threshold of the

South into the land of airstar Y and Hospitality of mules and mammies plantations porticos and proud flirtatious bells of kernels cotton chivalry and colored cooking so this was really the image that was sold to tourists who visited Maryland a story kind of of southern hospitality um I recently put out a book

Full of holiday recipes from Maryland um I’m kind of fascinated by the ways especially when I was doing my research that holid Nostalgia intersects with that whole Maryland Mystique the hotel and Catering Industries Rose to prominence after the Civil War and they declined during the Civil Rights era

There’s a commercial industry built on professional chefs but most of them know um most of them didn’t leave behind recipes because they didn’t really use recipes but there was an interplay between the hospitality industry and home cooking many marylanders who could never afford or were not allowed to set

Foot in one of those hotels nevertheless had great pride in their food and the recipes that they shared further complicating the picture we have the influence of groups of people who have come and left Maryland some traditions were adopted right into the fold like sauerkraut served with turkey in Baltimore on

Thanksgiving and Christmas which came by German and Eastern European immigrants or oyster stew which stemmed from Iris uh Irish Catholic traditions of foregoing meat on Christmas of course not all groups have historically had access to produce cookbooks a lot of people have oral Traditions they don’t even bother with

Recipes to begin with so my recipe database is always going to be a very biased and uneven sample of what people were cooking and eating in Maryland I’m lucky enough to have a few cookbooks that are the exception to the rule some of them are in local library

Collections are available online I used many of these books as sources for my book festive Maryland recipes this is a book called 300 years of black cooking in St Mary’s County um this amazing cookbook was put out in the 1970s by amicor volunteers working with a local anti-poverty group called

Citizens for Progress this book has recipes for crab cakes white potato pie sweet potato pie shadroe Poke Salad and it has several recipes for stuffed ham stuffed ham originated with the people who are enslaved by Jesuit PR uh priests on plantations in St Mary’s County some people say it was originally made with

Other parts of the pigs um and then people started using hams when they were available um the hams are stuffed with a mixture of greens and spices heavily spiced including Mustard Seed and hot pepper and then they’re boiled until everything is well cooked stuffed ham is a very

Special and beloved tradition in St Mary’s County you can get it in local delies if you’re a part of a St Mary’s County family you might have that one person in your family who’s a keeper of the flame and brings this to your family holidays another cookbook I was excited

To get to finally reference um because I’ve been aware of this one for a number of years um is this relatively old Maryland Jewish cookbook this was put out in 1905 to benefit the Hebrew day Nursery it’s called pots pans and Pie plates and how to use them at the time

This book was made Jewish Charities were working with newly immigrated Jewish people from Eastern Europe and helping them to maintain their faith and traditions while also getting them acclimated to life in Baltimore what’s interesting about this book is that it has recipes for crab and oyster and other non- kosher preparations like

Maryland Fried Chicken this is a book called recipes from Little Bohemia um this book was put out by the St Wes L Bohemian Catholic Church which is near Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1910 the Czech population in the neighborhood known as Little Bohemia numbered somewhere around 10,000 although this cookbook came out

Many decades later the population of the area was shifting at the time it still documents many of the recipes that people would have used to celebrate Christmas including carp soup and a barley Cass roll called Cuba which is in my book festive Maryland recipes in 1907 The Baltimore Sun wrote

About how these sturdy foreign born folks celebrate U tide and they said among Baltimore’s adopted citizens none is more strict in the observance of the feast than the Bohemian who follows the customs of the old country to the letter um they said that festivities included Christmas trees colorful candles and

Rituals meant to induce good luck children hung stockings in anticipation of the expected visit of the jezisek Santa Claus in the article it says um that actually translates to baby Jesus early morning mass at this church was a must they also referred to karp as the Bohemian turkey and said Bohemians would

As soon do without their Kuba and karp As Americans without their turkey mince pie and Plum Pudding when I first made recipes from this cookbook it’s a 1980 cookbook from the women’s Welsh Club of Baltimore I wasn’t aware that the Welsh presence in Maryland dated back to the 1830s when

Miners came to Western Maryland and Harford County um because they had familiarity with a mining equipment used here um in 1981 the owner of my copy of this book tried a few recipes and wrote notes beside them in the margins they wrote um 1981 good St David’s day or next to a

Cake they wrote St David’s Day 1981 odd but good the Feast of St David who is the patron saint of Wales is observed on March 1st the anniversary of his death in 589 ad this holiday is a celebration of all things Welsh from food to clothing to Flora the Frostburg Mining

Journal newspaper actually announced St David’s Day Celebrations at the Mount Zion Welsh Baptist Church annually Starting In 1902 um I was very excited when I finally found a cookbook from Baltimore’s Little Italy um there’s so many delicious sounding recipes in here but I also noticed a lot of recipes for

Easter and I thought a lot about how Easter is is such an important holiday in many cultures I referenced a lot of oral histories um often times including the same people who contribute to these cookbooks um this particular person did not but she described Easter in Little

Italy her name was Ida chalini as bosito and she said that on Easter it seemed like you just stopped everything stopped in the house by Holy Thursday your house would be Immaculate everything had to be clean and you’d go out visiting the church so she said that her family would go

Through East Baltimore and visit the other Catholic churches including the local Polish Church probably that Bohemian church as well um this is a very popular cookbook in Baltimore called Ambrosia and nectar I’ve talked to a lot of people who have copies of this book in their kitchen um it’s from

1962 and it’s from the Greek Orthodox Church my copy was donated to me um by the late Dr atricia Smith this book also contains many Easter recipes which would refer to Greek Orthodox Easter sometimes that overlaps with um Catholic Easter but at other times it falls on a different weekend

Entirely the recipe we used in festive Maryland recipes uses an interesting ingredient baking ammonia it smells like ammonia you add liquid to it um but the smell goes away and then the cookies come out kind of uniquely crispy um Ambrosia and nectar had other Easter recipes in its book including lamb lung

Soup and of course bread baked with red Easter eggs this is a later cookbook of mine it’s from 1986 um but I’d like to reference it because it was um put out by the women’s Fellowship of the bethl Korean church it was located in Baltimore at the time now it’s an elate

City and the Susan Park the chairperson of this book wrote that the compilers of the book intended to introduce as many Korean recipes as possible to those who were accustomed to Western food and the book also repeats the recipes in Korean in the latter half of the book it

Includes recipes for kimchi Korean Fried Chicken pickled shrimp octopus with hot sauce banana bread crab imperial New York cheesecake corn beef lasagna and more um I also referenced from a lot of more traditional older Maryland cookbooks like this classic book is called maryn’s way it was put out in the

1960s by Hammond hardwood house and what they did is they took a lot of those really vague recipes that say cook it until it’s done and made the instructions a little bit more descriptive um but the book still feels very historic has a lot of beautiful imagery

Um it was put out to raise money for the Hammond Harwood House in Annapolis the recipes come from different historic manuscripts at the um State archive the Maryland Historical Society and also the author Francis Kelly and her maid Alice Brown took these recipes and adapted them so they’re a little bit more

Understandable and the ingredients are easy to find I suspect that that book is the book that really cemented white potato pie as being a Maryland dish I’ve seen recipes from other places um white potato pie is like sweet potato pie it comes from the English tradition of making absolutely everything into a

Pudding um so a lot of people who are unfamiliar with this it sounds intriguing and strange but if you think closely about it think about rice pudding or something um the standard spices are the same nutmeg and maybe some cinnamon I like to flavor mine with

Lemon a lot of people associate this pie with the Eastern Shore but I have recipes from all over the state um a church called All Hallows Church in Davidsonville Maryland used to include this in their annual Thanksgiving starting in 1900 I think that did a lot to spread

White potato pie in Maryland and they included their recipe in that Maryland’s way cookbook of course a lot of the cookbooks that I reference are much older from handwritten Community cookbooks um all the way back to the first published cookbook um published by a marylander which is domestic cookery

By Elizabeth elette Lee that book is from 1859 the name may ring a bell because she was part of the Quaker family that owned the Mills around elette City a re including her recipe for New Year’s cake which are what we would Now call cookies um little cakes her recipes made it into

Other cookbooks like Mrs Benjamin Chu Howard’s 1870 book 50 years in the Maryland kitchen um her recipe was also copied into some Maryland cookbook manuscripts the wording and ingredients are often very similar if not exactly the same so in this way by putting these recipes into my database I can see the

Influence of certain cookbooks and recipes Rees or even the social connections through U which the recipes spread Mrs Benjamin Shu Howard actually copied a ton of her recipes from a slightly lesser known cookbook called Queen of the kitchen by Mary Lloyd Tyson I did some research

Into the author of this book and she was a relative of Francis Scott Key um and she was also a a relative of Mrs Benjamin Chu Howard by marriage so they probably even knew each other one thing I’ve learned when studying these cookbooks is that basically everyone

Involved is related in some way or other other women in their extended social networks compiled these cookbook manuscripts it was a very popular thing to do they would uh copy recipes from people they knew or even from women’s magazines and newspapers newspapers are actually a really big source of recipes and recipes

Would be shared in newspapers all over the country later recipes um sorry later newspapers would share recipes from readers um when I cook from these I often do more research on the people um you can see here this was a cooking contest in 1911 they published the

Entire address of the winners so I use this information and do some research into people and you can kind of Trace their whole life through stories and recipes in these old newspapers looking through my database and these newspaper articles I also found a lot of wbe holiday traditions

That didn’t survive they didn’t all make it into my book but I thought a lot about lost holiday recipes that never became Traditions at all maybe they were simply two of their time this is an image of a salad that I made called Cris cringle salad you slice apples and cook

Them in a sauce flavored with cinnamon disc candy and then serve it with sliced avocado other similar recipes use pears instead of apples um because they’re shaped like bells and you would dye cream cheese to pipe little bows at the top I don’t know about you but I haven’t

Met anyone who admitted to this being a holiday tradition of theirs but at the same time everything was new at one time many recipes we take for granted today started as trendy ideas in newspapers magazines or cooking shows my own family has a tradition of eating um these donuts called fos nuts

Um their jour in origin they’re made on Fat Tuesday they came to Maryland with German immigrants in Western Maryland they’re actually known as kinklings and there’s a kingling day is Fat Tuesday essentially I have some very old recipes for these donuts and my mother and her siblings talked about these my whole

Life but when I looked into my own family’s connection to these Donuts it turned out that they came from a 1960s newspaper article by food writer Clementine paddleford my grandmother clipped this recipe and every year after it ran she would make these donuts for dinner once a

Year a few months ago I set up a booth at the farmers market and I asked people about their Maryland holiday traditions I heard some great stories people talk to me about Sour Broten making apple pies um the variety was great vegetarian chili Swedish meatballs um a few people came up and

They would tell me about a tradition that was maybe newer um and I sometimes got the sense that they felt like those recipes were less important but in doing the book I like to imagine going back to be the first person to use oysters instead of fish in

This Christmas stew for the first years in a new land um and that became a tradition that lasted and spread to other groups of people or imagine how meaningful it was for the ladies of the bethl Korean church to introduce their new friends and family to kimchi and

Rice cake soup and to celebrate Lunar New Year as their roots in Maryland grew deeper um I once read historian and author Michael Twitty say something that stuck with me he said the food doesn’t give us meaning we give meaning to our food so we can really honor our

Ancestors with recipes and traditions that they left us and we can honor our chosen families with what we bring to the table or we can just bring out these recipes year after year because we like The Familiar Taste and we wouldn’t excuse to eat donuts for dinner if you leave with anything today

I hope that you’re inspired to document family or personal recipes whether you hail from this state or not um the foods you like to eat the dishes you make for friends even the foods you would like to try they’re all a part of your history um I’m still very interested in

Culinary history I’m still finding new stories every day um finding new manuscripts scripts new books and new recipes when I started a Blog based on my database I committed myself to two years of about a recipe a week um but I currently have no end in

Sight so this is just a little bit about my current book festive Maryland recipes um it has recipes that have been adapted by recipe developer racial rort so that you can follow the recipes at home um this lovely design by my friend Sarah TOMCO and if you’re familiar with John

Shields he’s actually a um Chef who has been on public television promoting Maryland recipes for decades so he was kind enough to write a forward um I really appreciate it and um can we get to the Q&A sure thanks so um first can you just tell everyone where they can get copies

Of your book if they are interested oh yeah I should I should have said that right um I have them at my website which is Old Line plate.com um you can order them direct and I ship them out um they’re also in some Maryland bookstores I have a list on my website of

Bookstores um and I encourage people if you have a local bookstore that you think would be interested in this book please tell them to contact me because I’d love to get them out there I just think it’s such a beautiful book that I want more people to see

It and if you need it I put that oldin plate.com into the chat box so you can just click on that link can jump right over there uh one question from our audience is what does Old Line plate come from so Maryland is known as the old line State um which is a

Revolutionary war reference um so it’s just play on words with Old Line state to Old Line plate um a lot of us in Maryland didn’t know about this Old Line State thing until the state quarters came out and we got the quarters that said Old Line State and everybody had to

Look it up so that’s a yeah that’s where that comes from can you tell us a little bit about how you got started on this cooking Journey yeah um that white potato pie that I showed a few slides ago actually that exact picture is from a Southern Heritage cookbook that my

Mother had and I had never heard of Maryland white potato pie so I had to make it um there were a lot of other Maryland recipes in this cookbook series like Maryland baked liver Maryland Fried Chicken that I talked about I was unfamiliar with a lot of these so I

Started researching them um I ended up finding that Maryland’s way cookbook and that was a Gateway into a lot more recipes um there’s another book I didn’t talk about much from the 30s called eat drink and be marry in Maryland that’s even older and it’s just a collection of

All these different traditions and things that were really popular at the time like deviled crab um where will have many recipes for double crabs in it so I just started going deeper and deeper and working on this database and collecting hundreds of community cookbooks what would you say is your

Favorite recipe to cook um I actually Maryland specifically yeah I like making that um that white potato pie because it’s pretty easy I just make it in a food processor um I’m trying to think it kind of changes over time by having so many cookbooks and my cookbooks range up

Through modern times I have access to pretty much any recipe that’s made the rounds so what makes something a Maryland recipe you know if it’s in a cookbook from marylander I guess you could call it a Maryland recipe um so I’ve made a lot of things that are more

Popular around the rest of the country like the um the strawberry pretzel salad with Jello-O um and like a pretzel crust that’s one that I really liked to make but it’s not specifically Regional to Maryland like some of these old Oddball white potato pie Fried Chicken but um it

You know it made its way to me through Maryland co*ke book so to me I associate it with the blog um I also like to make the oysters stew on Christmas it’s just a fun and very easy tradition to resurrect uh we have the the Jello-O pretzel tradition in my family as well

But we call it pretzel salad so it counts like a side yeah exactly all right a couple more questions so why Maryland is Maryland unique as a state with a concentration of recipes or ingredients um would Pennsylvania or Virginia have fewer connection traditional food is it that Baltimore was a prominent City on

The Mid-Atlantic Coast or uh why Maryland um so for me sticking to Maryland was just a way to limit myself so that I don’t try to collect every cookbook um but the more I read I did kind of find a unique Confluence um of things including things from those other

States the Pennsylvania Dutch influences here it’s a part of Baltimore um scrapple is certainly a Maryland food and then there’s that whole kind of Southern influence as well which I originally wasn’t so aware of um so it’s just kind of an interesting history it’s also interesting that it used to just be

So well known and kind of isn’t now I don’t think people think of much other than crab cakes when they think of Maryland Food um but mostly it’s just a way to kind of pick something and stick to it um I kind of like to say that uh you

Know if you ask like where’s the best food in the world like I like to say Marland but also everywhere else you know like let’s just let it all be some perative I think H could you say anything more about Mrs BC Howard the early cookbook

Author uh DM Corbett is working on a biography of her husband’s Aunt so she’s interested in finding a copy of her cookbook oh interesting um so that that cookbook is digitized online um and it should be pretty easy to find there are also some documents from their family at

The Maryland Historical Society um she lived on an estate a plantation essentially called badier which is actually near where the badier hotel is in Baltimore now um I don’t know too many specific details of her life other than the The cookbook which was actually put out when she was much older so as

The title suggests by the 50 years in a Maryland kitchen but the book was really popular there’s a 1940s or 1950s reprint of it where they took all the recipes and made them like lower fat and took out the heavy cream and butter I like to stick to the originals personally but it

Was a very popular cookbook and a really good document of that whole Maryland kind of Mystique and okay next question is what info do you note about the recipe in your database aside from the recipe itself um it depends on the recipe um but I um actually have different aspects to

My database I mainly try to get the recipe and then the person um which has been really cool because I’ve been able to track people certain people are prolific in multiple community cookbooks so I found people who’ve contributed recipes um one was I think the record is

From that women’s Welsh Club a Baltimore cookbook a woman in that cookbook had contributed a recipe to a book in 1930 um and that book was 1980 so that that’s the biggest Gap that I have of the same person and I was able to research her and it was definitely the

Same woman um so I get their biographical information when I actually make the rest recipes for my blog I enter all the ingredients and the recipe instructions and everything but um I only do that if something’s especially interesting because for now I’m on the process of trying to just get the names

Of these different recipes into my database but it has a lot of aspects you can tag them with you know soups or I have a tag for white potato pie because a lot of white potato pie recipes used to just be called pudding um so it’s it’s a pretty complex U data

Base and uh I think the final question I have is where did you grow up and where do you live now and did you cook with your mom grandmother other um I grew up in Prince George’s County um in Beltsville and Riverdale um and I did

Cook with my grandmother we used to make we used to pick blackberries and make blackberry pies in the summer eat them with ice cream um and uh with shortening crust so I’ve diverged from some of those some of those Traditions I like to make a Butter Crust

Now um my mother’s really good with cooking seafood my grandfather used to fish and get us all kinds of flounder um and game and stuff um which I wasn’t when I was younger I wasn’t involved with the cooking of that but um yeah I wasn’t like a heavy you know just at my

Mom’s side cooking all the time mostly special occasions with my grandmother like when we go Gathering all right well thank you so much for taking the time I think everyone uh really enjoyed your presentation uh there was a lot of stuff in the chat just about um how much it was a

Wonderful presentation and they enjoyed your research and your uh references people also were sharing a lot of memories about what they called pretzel salad pretzel surprise um eating fried chicken uh things like that so uh thank you again for taking that time and uh we hope to see you again at our next

Tuesday talk um I just saw another sorry I saw another question pop up they asked if I run across um Colonial recipes um and I actually don’t have any that are specifically from Maryland written down um that I know of most of the history that I know about Colonial Foods in

Maryland I get from like travel journals people who visited and came through and talked about what they ate um I think it’s interesting because the 1800s you really have all these written recipes but the further back you go there are some there are some manuscripts that are possibly that old at least Sometimes

Women would start the manuscript and their mother would finish it or another I mean their daughter would finish it um so there are manuscripts that might have both but I don’t know of any recipes that I specifically think of or Define as being that old um so just thought I’d

Get that one I really for I appreciate everyone um joining us for this and I appreciate all the questions and um you know anytime anybody is looking for a recipe or looking for a copy of a cookbook um I’m always happy to try to dig that stuff up and help people find

Information yeah so if you visit uh the old line plate.com there’s information on how to contact Cara and you can look and see uh check out her database and check out uh check out her books Judy just ordered your books so she’s excited thank you so much all right well

Everyone you enjoy the rest of your day and it was great spending time