Winter scenes with Beatty's Steam Cracker Factory of Baltimore

Three snowy scenes on the trade cards for Beatty steam bakery, since many parts of the US are dealing with a large amont of snow and sleet. 19th-century Ice Boats, Toboggan/long sled and Sleigh.

The Beveridge Automatic Cooker

The winter scene in a horn is from a Baltimore company's trade card (3x4 1/4in.). Patented on Feb 12, 1889, this is more recent than the steam kitchens I have studied. Christmas foods and other Dec. food history zoom talks are listed below.

Baltimore's Patapsco Baking Powder

William Pitt Clotworthy (1829Ireland-1902) of Baltimore created and patented Patapsco Baking Powder. The following excerpt from Howard's The Monumental City [Baltimore] 1873, is about its contents and unnamed earlier competitors – Bird (1843), Horsford (Rumford 1859) and Royal (1866).

Virtual talks: Anchovies; OPA rationing in WWII USA; Henry Orr, a Black Caterer in Federal DC; Appalachia (NC)...

Frederick MD working hearths ... Museums by Candlelight

On Saturday, December 9, there will be 26 sites open for free with music, activities, and crafts in Frederick and the County. Several homes have squirrel tail ovens (in small section in photo) and other interesting features. Always fun. If you are nearby, go visit.

Fire in flour mills - Sanborn fire insurance maps, 6 fire dangers 1795

Fire was one threat to flour mills, flooding was another. The Sanborn maps of all buildings in a town (earliest 1868) contained information to help insurance agents... and firemen - building material (stone - blue, wood - yellow, brick - red), fire equipment in the complex, what was on each floor, fuel and more. This is an Ellicott City MD mill. Check to see if your local mill, home or other building is on a Sanborn map.
Oliver Evans wrote about six flour mill fire hazards in 1795.

A Rice Dish with Peaches & Maryland food history taped talks

Rice pudding with peaches on the bottom from Elizabeth Ellicott Lea's Domestic Cookery, 1845... the first Maryland cookbook. Rice was boiled in milk, sweetened, put over peach slices, then baked for two hours. When warm it was like other rice puddings, but it compacted as it cooled.
Many Md. taped talks, below.

Peach Cordial 1845

Elizabeth Ellicott Lea's Cordial recipe was included in her slim first edition of 1845 and the enlarged 1846 and 1851 editions (reprinted for 40 years). Her Peach Cordial required peaches, sugar, brandy, mace and blanched peach kernels. Born in 1793 in Ellicott City, Maryland, Lea included many peach recipes, which have been great, as have her other recipes. I have not made a cake flavored with her Peach Cordial, yet.

German Sweet Pickled Peaches

It's August, so yet another peach recipe from Maryland. Tyson's 1870 recipe called for equal amounts of vinegar and brown sugar, with cinnamon. Marylanders Howard's Peach Chutnee is equal, but Lea's Spiced Peaches used 4:1 sugar to vinegar. As for the German in the title...

Washington Cakes or Pies, Fat Tuesday donuts or pancakes

On Shrove Tuesday, it was a tradition for many Christians to use the last of the fat before Lent. In England it became Pancake Day and in some places the pancakes were tossed (1837 sketch). Germanic areas in Europe and the US made doughnuts, fachnachts, or kinklings - the last only in Frederick MD.
And for Washington's Birthday ... when Washington Pies were cakes. Three cakes named after our first president were: a cake with raisins & currants (1830 recipe), Pearl ash with brandy & spices (1837), and a yeast pancake (1842).

Peach Chutnee, India and Mrs. B. C. Howard

Jane Grant Gilmor Howard (1801-1890) wrote the charity cookbook Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen in 1873. This "East India receipt" is spiced with finely chopped garlic, ginger, red chili peppers, mustard seed, salt, cider vinegar, sugar and raisins. She had several family connections to India.

Lady Baltimore Ice Cream and Spun Sugar Webs

Owen Wister's popular 1906 novel was followed the next year by a Lady Baltimore Cake recipe, and in 1909 the Lady Baltimore Ice Cream appeared. picture of LB cake

Doctors' house calls and medicine

Doctors attended to the sick in their homes, but according to Rosalie Calvert of Maryland, "he makes us prepare all the remedies."  Many cookbooks during this period included "simple remedies."

Olio

Olio was an extravagant stew of many meats, vegetables, herbs and spices served in it's own "close-covered" cooking "olio pot."   Vincent La Chapelle, "Chief Cook" to the Earl of Chesterfield, included three recipes in his 1733 work The Modern Cook - one French Olio and two Spanish.  By the 1860s a Crab Olio was in two Maryland cookbooks - no meat, but crab, eggplant and tomatoes.

Maryland Peaches: Baltimore Peach Cake & Ellizabeth Ellicott Lea's Peach Marmalade

The fluffy, yeast cake topped with peaches existed by 1910 when it was mentioned in a poem by a Baltimore Sun writer.  It was and is sold in Baltimore bakeries during peach season.  Recently, marmalade is spread over the cake as a glaze. Maryland cookbook author Elizabeth Ellicott Lea's 1846 marmalade recipe is easy and delicious.

19th century Strawberry Parties

During strawberry season the demand "is enormous" and in an 1857 article they sold for 12 or 15 cents a quart so "even the moderately rich buy berries daily." Maryland Strawberry Parties 1831-2 and Jane Austen

Federal-era kitchen apparatus in Gadsby's Indian Queen Hotel, Baltimore

By 1815, the Indian Queen Hotel in Baltimore had state-of-the-art kitchen equipment: a "patent oven" (metal wall oven), "steam for boiling" (steam kitchens), "stoves set in brick" (stew stoves), smoke jacks to turn meat on spits and a coffee roaster.

Happy 300th New Orleans - 1800s beignets, coffee and the French Market

After her husband traveled to New Orleans in 1850 (he missed Cafe du Monde, 1861), Jane Gilmor Howard (Mrs. B.C. Howard) included a recipe for "beignets souffles" or "Balloon Fritters", deep fried in lard, in her Fifty years in a Maryland Kitchen cookbook, 1873. 

Maryland crabs ... before Old Bay

In 1939, Gustav Brunn fled Germany and then developed the Old Bay crab seasoning - celery salt, peppers, paprika and secret spices - in Baltimore. Some spices used in 1800s Maryland recipes were nutmeg, salt, pepper, cayenne pepper, mace, cloves, and allspice. Photo of 1906 crab pickers.

Stew stoves (or stewing stoves) in two Hamptons

Hampton, north of Baltimore, was the large home of the wealthy Ridgely family  completed in 1790.  The more well-known Hampton Court Palace, west of London, contains the huge kitchen complex of King Henry VIII (1491-1547).

Queen of the Kitchen: a collection of old Maryland receipts by Miss Tyson

In 1870, a charity cookbook was compiled by "Miss Tyson" to fund a new church building for the Protestant Episcopal Church in Oakland (western Maryland).  The first edition was so successful that the church building was built.  Enlarged and no longer for charity, the cookbook went through three more editions by a publisher in Philadelphia.  So, who was "M. L. Tyson"?