On Being Merry in Maryland

Are we having fun yet? Edward Tunis illustrator.

Some of the advice in this great old-time cookbook could get you killed. In particular I would mention the assertion that poisonous mushrooms will turn a silver spoon black in the cooking process. Not so, according to an army of researchers. An old wives’ tale, and one wonders how the wives grew old if they abided by that advice.

   Other than that, though, I thoroughly enjoyed “Eat, Drink and Be Merry In Maryland,” first issued in the 1930s under authorship of Frederick Philip Stieff. It has since been purged of racial insensitivities and reissued as a historical treasure by Johns Hopkins University Press. It lists at a hefty price on Amazon,
over $20 last time I checked.

   The recipes were gathered by Stieff, of a prominent Baltimore family, from the manor houses of formerly grand estates (illustrated in sketches), hotels, restaurants, clubs, even railway dining cars. 

   Notes attached to recipes regarding pedigree and provenance are entertaining and informative, as in one telling us the recipe comes from Miss Kittie S. Quynn of Frederick, niece of Miss Emily E. Hanshaw -- who was in turn grandniece of Barbara Fritchie, heroine of the patriotic Whittier poem. Such things mattered a great deal in those days.

   The tone of anecdotes can be snobbishly patrician and the humor is definitely of the groaner sort, but the window opened on Maryland’s culinary heritage overshadows faults.

   As always, I went looking stews. I found Brunswick, which is covered in another entry in this collection. So much for stews. But in the course of that search I encountered many items supporting the assertion that “The cuisine of Maryland is surely the most diversified of any similar area in the country.” 

   Of course there are a dozen or more recipes featuring crabs. An entire chapter is devoted to oysters, another to terrapin, and one focuses on puddings. One chapter is titled “The Cooking and Stuffing of Hams and the Curing of Meats.”

   Recipes range from modest to grand, the latter calling for ingredients such as “fifty pounds of lean and fat pork” or 125 pounds of cabbage. 

   Ingredients and processes are often less than precise as the author assumes a good deal of kitchen knowledge on the reader’s part – as would, no doubt, have been the case in those days.

   There is a salad referred to several times as “cold slaw,” but it is cole slaw, from a Dutch term for cabbage salad.

   Quite an array of baked goods will be found including breads, pan-cakes, muffins, pones, rolls and waffles. One cake recipe calls for 30 eggs, another produces a cake using no dairy products.

   A recipe for buckwheat cakes originates at Deep Creek Lake in Garrett County, source of another simple recipe from a descendant of mighty hunter Meshach Browning – for bear steak. There are in fact a great many recipes involving wild game.

   Appendices include menus revealing the vast amounts of wine, spirits and foodstuffs involved in the entertainment of “His Excelly Gen. Washington” upon visits to Annapolis.