These tomes tell the story of traditional cooking on the Bay.
Cookbooks are much more than simply collections of recipes. They are a cultural archive of the times, a reflection of tastes and trends. Here are 10 regional cookbooks, published between the 1930s and the present day. Their authors include a former first lady of Maryland, the vice president of a defunct piano company, a couple of restaurateurs, members of a local junior league, and a guy who tests his recipes in something called a ‘crab lab.’ All reflect the time and place in which they were written and include recipes inspired by the bounty of the Bay.
Eat, Drink and Be Merry in Maryland
Compiled by Frederick Philip Stieff, 1932
THE SKINNY: “Eat, Drink and Be Merry in Maryland” is Frederick Philip Stieff’s love letter to Maryland’s gastronomic traditions. Compiled in 1932 when Stieff was vice president of the piano company that bore his family’s name, Stieff mines the state’s culinarians, including home cooks, restaurant managers, and many African-American domestics, for their local specialties.
QUOTABLE: In order to capture the spirit of both the cook and the recipe, instructions are written in conversational and often frank language without a separate list of ingredients. A recipe for frogs legs from W.T. Emory, manager of the Log Inn on the Chesapeake in Annapolis, advises that, “Frogs should be served right after they are killed.” Stieff’s headnotes for the recipes reflect his devotion to the state’s local bounty: “Maryland seafood properly cooked is all that the most exacting palate can demand. The pleasure it gives can be augmented only by indulgence within the sight of its famous origin—the great Chesapeake Bay.”
RECIPES HIGHLIGHTS: Oysters have their own chapter, as does a section devoted to “The Cooking and Stuffing of Hams and the Curing of Meats,” but it’s the “Jellies, Preserves, and Pickles” chapter that offers such long-forgotten comestibles as calves’ foot or isinglass jellies and cucumber catsup.
A Cook’s Tour of the Eastern Shore
Prepared by the Junior Auxiliary of Memorial Hospital of Easton, Md., 1948 (first printing)
THE SKINNY: This quintessential community cookbook captures an era when hostesses served punch and women used their husband’s first and last names prefaced by “Mrs.” as their own. The charm of the cookbook lies in trying to identify how many hands transcribed the book’s handwritten recipes and numbered pages, or the artist behind the sweet pen-and-ink drawings like a rabbit relaxing in a frying pan.
QUOTABLE: The game section fascinates with recipes for rabbit, dove, muskrat “tred avon,” and a short discourse on the difference between wild ducks you eat and so-called “trash ducks.” (The text admits, “you eat trash ducks too, but there is some difference in the cooking process,” namely, a soaking in salted water “to remove the strong-
tasting blood.”)
RECIPE HIGHLIGHTS: Mrs. Kenneth B. Millett offers an easy refrigerator cake that through the magic of gelatine [sic] and separated, thickly beaten egg whites and yolks, requires no baking. Just as unusual—but perhaps more appealing—is Mrs. William T. Hammond’s white potato pie spiced with brandy and nutmeg.
My Favorite Maryland Recipes
Mrs. J Millard Tawes, 1964
THE SKINNY: Written during her tenure as Maryland’s first lady (1959-1967), Helen Avalynne Tawes’ “My Favorite Maryland Recipes” simultaneously invokes the traditional food of her Crisfield upbringing and the days of formal dinner parties—like the one she and the governor hosted in honor of then Sen. John F. Kennedy in 1960—that began with a fresh fruit cup and ended with mints. The cookbook was no mere side project for a governor’s wife; Tawes loved cooking. In her introduction, she calls it her “avocation.” She was committed to preserving old Maryland recipes she learned from her mother and mother-in-law and spoke to her readers as fellow cooks.
QUOTABLE: The most endearing quality of this cookbook is Tawes’ voice, which reveals itself in homespun language, like, “A girl just wasn’t worth her cooking salt unless she knew how to make terrapin soup” or “Crab cannot be enhanced, only complemented” and the small descriptive asides she adds to her recipes (kidney bean salad is described as “sounds very plebian but really delicious!”).
RECIPE HIGHLIGHTS: Although Mrs. Tawes includes detailed instructions for Maryland-cooked muskrat, most of her recipes reflect a less rustic, though thoroughly Eastern Shore sensibility (see pink rhubarb sherbet, sweet pickled watermelon, fried cucumbers).
Maryland Seafood Cookbook volumes I-III
From the Maryland Department of Seafood and Aquaculture (formerly the Office of Seafood Marketing), 1980s
THE SKINNY: You don’t necessarily associate the Maryland state government with culinary prowess, but in the early 1980s, the state’s Office of Seafood Marketing published three paperback volumes of seafood recipes that became popular enough to be reissued in the mid-’90s. (All three volumes are available for sale at marylandseafood.org/cookbooks.) Volume I covered “traditional tidewater recipes,” featuring Maryland favorites like crabs and oysters. Volume II tapped into the restaurant community with 93 recipes from Maryland chefs, while Volume III ventured into 1980s “contemporary cooking techniques,” offering microwave-friendly seafood preparations.
QUOTABLE: Volume II, in particular, is a snapshot of Maryland seafood restaurant history with recipe contributions from venerable spots like Oxford’s Robert Morris Inn (oysters a la Gino) and now closed favorites like Busch’s Chesapeake Inn in Annapolis or the Quarterdeck Restaurant in Ocean City, accompanied by pen and ink sketches of the old buildings.
RECIPE HIGHLIGHTS: Volume I’s six recipes for crab imperial invite a week of recipe tasting with one day off for rest!
Mrs. Kitching’s Smith Island Cookbook
Frances Kitching and Susan Stiles Dowell, 1981
THE SKINNY: An intimate glimpse into the rhythm of Smith Islanders’ daily lives that’s part social history, part cookbook. Arranged by season, the book offers the basics on cleaning bluefish and shucking oysters to the difference between clams and manos or soft-shell clams. It is less about Mrs. Kitching herself than of the community in which her (now-closed) restaurant flourished, but it is through her homey recipes and Susan Stiles Dowell’s lyrical prose that we come to know Mrs. Kitching and Smith Island itself.
QUOTABLE: The book is peppered with local tales like “Eddie’s famous shark story,” in which Eddie Evans caught a huge shark when the fishermen from Crisfield told him what he’d been seeing in the water was really a stingray.
RECIPES HIGHLIGHTS: While the recipe for Mrs. Kitching’s 10-Layer Smith Island cake (possibly the original recipe made without the now-common Duncan Hines cake mix) is not in the cookbook (it can be found on the Smith Island website, smithisland.org), you can find recipes for Eastern Shore comfort food like stewed crabmeat and dumplings and homemade scrapple made from pork liver and lean salt pork. Mrs. Kitching’s fig cake makes use of homemade fig preserves, a result of the island’s bounty of fresh fruit in the summer.
From a Lighthouse Window: Recipes and Recollections
From the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels, Maryland, 1989
THE SKINNY: The use of “recollections” in the subtitle is apt, as this volume is as much a history lesson as it is a cookbook. Divided roughly into two halves, the first part is a compendium of historic photos, stories, and recipes like the (non-edible) mast glop, a combination of varnish, boiled linseed oil, and turpentine used to coat boat masts. The second half of the book reflects the culinary evolution of the Eastern Shore, with mostly contemporary recipes that include ingredients like tamari soy sauce and capers interspersed with regional recipes, such as Southern Maryland stuffed ham or ones featuring local ingredients like silver queen corn in a corn souffle.
QUOTABLE: The book relates the famous story of when little Mary Jane Haddaway spilled peas down Harry S. Truman’s back at a lodge on Jefferson (Poplar) Island, and the president quipped: “Aw, hell, honey, don’t worry about it. You’ll have a story to tell your grandchildren.”
RECIPE HIGHLIGHTS: Some of the historic recipes are associated with families who have lived on the Eastern Shore since the 19th century, like Mildred Kemp’s secret ingredient crab soup (the secret ingredient is a pinch of sugar), created at Wade’s Point Farm, today known as Wade’s Point Inn.
Chesapeake Bay Cooking
John Shields, 1990
THE SKINNY: With his boyish good looks and easy charm, it’s no wonder chef John Shields garnered an audience for his Chesapeake Bay Cooking television show on PBS. But it was his “Chesapeake Bay Cooking,” the show’s inspiration, that launched regional Eastern Shore cooking into a national spotlight in the early ’90s.
QUOTABLE: Narrated with folksy good humor, Shields takes readers on a tour of maritime Maryland, introducing them to local cooks like St. Mary’s native Joanne Pritchett, who admits that when she’s preparing to make authentic beaten biscuits, she gets herself “good and mad” by thinking about her sister-in-law who ran off with her husband after her grandmother’s funeral, a thought that “galls [her] into making some of the tenderest biscuits around.”
RECIPE HIGHLIGHTS: Shields ranges all over the region for his recipes, including instructions for peppery South of the Mason Dixon greens and a mace cake whose flavor is so addictive, Shields concludes, that mace must be a drug. Alva Crockett, the three-term former mayor of Tangier Island, dictates a recipe for Tangier Island clam chowder that calls for 50—count ’em—clams.
Queen Anne Goes to the Kitchen
The Episcopal Church Women of St. Paul’s Parish, 1993, 3rd edition
THE SKINNY: The original 1962 edition of “Queen Anne Goes to the Kitchen,” bound in cardboard covers and held together with metal rings, was created as a fundraiser and contained recipes contributed by families in this historic parish, originally founded in the 17th century as Chester Church, just outside of Centreville. The 1993 edition celebrates the parish’s 300th anniversary of its official establishment by the Vestry Act of 1692. It’s a thoughtful volume, divided into sensible chapters like Seafood, Bread, Pickles and Jams, Poultry, and Game, and the pages are interspersed with snippets of prayer, information about the church, and drawn renderings of parish architecture or church symbols.
QUOTABLE: In a recipe for Maryland beaten biscuits from the first edition, a line instructs: “beat batter hard for 20 minutes with the back end of an axe.”
RECIPE HIGHLIGHTS: As would be expected, the third edition reflects a more contemporary cooking sensibility, listing taco pie and golden nuggets, aka, chicken fingers, as well as more formal recipes, like the one for “real paté,” and the very old-fashioned and traditional Truitt family recipe for sweet pone. You can even find recipes for the date bars and peanut blossoms from the annual St. Paul’s Cookie Exchange.
The Chesapeake Bay Crabbiest Cookbook
Whitey Schmidt, 2000
THE SKINNY: When you’re a self-proclaimed “blue crab guru” and “crustacean sage,” one of your 10 Chesapeake Bay-based cookbooks has to be dedicated to crabs, right? Whitey Schmidt’s “The Chesapeake Bay Crabbiest Cookbook” is just that and more. Schmidt includes traditional preparations like Eastern Shore crab fritters and 19(!) recipes for the crispy soft shells whose photo graces the book’s dust jacket.
QUOTABLE: Schmidt peppers his book with crab-related photos (check out the shot of his son’s crab tattoo) and colorful tidbits and opinions about Chesapeake crab culture, including this nugget of crustacean logic:?“If Maryland is for crabs and Virginia is for lovers, then the Chesapeake Bay must be for crab lovers.”?
RECIPE HIGHLIGHTS: Schmidt tests all of his recipes in his Crisfield kitchen “crab lab,” so you can trust his instructions from avocado soup with lump crab to crab-stuffed zucchini bowlers wharf. Bohemia River crab stew calls for leeks, crab roe, crab meat, sherry, cream, and egg yolks. Tile Bridge crab casserole includes cooked lobster and artichoke hearts as well as crab. What’s not to like?
A Thyme to Entertain: Menus and Traditions of Annapolis
The Junior League of Annapolis, 2007
THE SKINNY: Compiled by members of Annapolis’ Junior League, the book’s menus are designed around entertaining, from a steeplechase picnic to a graduation celebration to a football tailgate.
QUOTABLE: Hostess tips for various events appear throughout. “When entertaining for a racing event make sure your table decor is upscale. Use your best linens, china, and silver…Ladies, don’t forget your finest hats. Men should wear seersucker suits and leave their socks at home.”
RECIPE HIGHLIGHTS: The recipes themselves aren’t entirely regional, though, you will find Eastern Shore chicken salad and some locally named recipes, like Kent Island Dessert Cheese Ball and St. Michaels Fruit Delight. Many recipes are quick and use shortcuts. The ever-popular whiskey cake, for example, calls for vanilla instant pudding mix and a generous amount of whiskey to doctor up a yellow cake mix base—a reflection, perhaps, of the busy life of today’s hostesses.
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