Kara Mae Harris Writes Holiday Cookbook Based on Vintage Maryland Recipes

Years ago, Kara Mae Harris cooked a Maryland white potato pie after coming across a recipe in her mother’s vintage cookbook, The Southern Heritage Pies and Pastries Cookbook.

“When I looked at the book, I was surprised to see Maryland in there,” says Harris, who works as an IT specialist for Hopkins Press. Creating that pie, sweetened with sugar and lemon juice and first made in the 1800s during the leaner months before summer harvest, piqued her interest in seeing what other historic recipes had been preserved in The Old Line State.

Soon Harris was spending hours in the stacks at Enoch Pratt Free Library and the Maryland Center for History and Culture in search of interesting recipes culled from cookbooks, news clippings, and handwritten manuscripts. To share the results of that research, she started a blog and called it Old Line Plate.

To date, Harris, 42, has some 60,000 recipes listed in her database, but the recipes have always been a vehicle for the stories that she’s after. In fact, she has actively discouraged her fans from cooking with the recipes, which are often just a list of ingredients, along with loosely written directions.

But last fall, after publishing a book that was a compilation of her columns, she had a change of heart.

“The book was just supposed to be a one-off,” she says, “but I got such a great response, it made me want to revive an old project.”

That project turned into Festive Maryland Recipes: Holiday Traditions from the Old Line State. With recipes culled from manuscripts, oral histories, libraries, and her collection of over 300 regional cookbooks, the book (set for release on Oct. 14) explores not only local holiday traditions and the stories behind them but provides readers with recipes they can actually cook with.

Harris enlisted cookbook author Rachel Rappaport to modernize some 20 recipes, from the doughnut-like kinklings for Fat Tuesday to chocolate macaroons for Passover.

“So many people picked up my last book and said, ‘I can’t wait to make this dish,’ in fact, I even have a disclaimer about the recipes on my blog—some of them are barely even recipes,” says Harris, with a laugh. “I just thought it would be fun to make the recipes a little more accessible for people who actually want to follow them or maybe even to encourage people to try the things they are reading about.”

Thanks to her crackerjack research skills, Harris was able to dig up little-known stories about the food and folkways of Marylanders, including ginger cream cake from the women’s Welsh club of Baltimore and barley casserole from East Baltimore’s Czech community, aka “Little Bohemia.”

With this book, Harris hopes that readers will create their own holiday traditions for years to come.

“You can’t take a recipe out of this book and have the heritage the people in this book have,” she says. “The only heritage you can have is your own. I like the idea of gathering as an excuse to get a few friends together and try something. Even if Easter, for example, is not one of the holidays you traditionally celebrate, it’s still a good day to have people come over and make something extra special—I like the idea of starting new traditions.”