Overview
Frederick Philip Stieff, scion of an old piano-making Baltimore family, was a celebrated amateur chef and a sort of menu historian. He made a personal crusade of collecting - mainly using handwritten family papers and the memories of aged cooks - old Maryland recipes. This volume, he declares in his preface, offers merely "a generalization, a diversification of the receipts (as he calls them) which have for decades of a century and more contributed toward the gastronomic supremacy of Maryland". Cooking and mixing instructions cover, in separate chapters, everything from oysters, a specialty of the counties bordering on the bay, to buckwheat and maple syrup, indigenous to western Maryland. Stieff fills out the stories behind many of the recipes in accompanying headnotes: the recipe for Ellin North Pudding, for example, was handed down by Ellin North, born in Baltimore in 1740 and later married to John Moale, colonel of the Baltimore town militia, to her great-grandson, Walter de Curzon Poultney. There are also several interesting appendixes: one gives us the menu for a traditional hunt breakfast at Elkridge; another spells out what was served at the Maryland Institute's "Grand Banquet of the Railways Celebrations" in 1857; yet another itemizes the food that George Mann (of Mann's Tavern, Annapolis) procured in December 1785 to stage a dinner celebrating the end of war with Britain.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9780801857362
- ISBN-10: 0801857368
- Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
- Publish Date: December 1997
- Dimensions: 6.97 x 5.53 x 0.91 inches
- Shipping Weight: 0.83 pounds
- Page Count: 354
- Reading Level: Ages 18-UP
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