The Chesapeake Collection: A Treasury of Recipes and Memorabilia from Maryland’s Eastern Shore 1983

The Chesapeake Collection: A Treasury of Recipes and Memorabilia from Maryland’s Eastern Shore 1983 has to be one of the community cookbooks I come across most often, if not the most common one. It was published by Tidewater Publishers of Centreville, Maryland. The copyright says 1983 by Woman’s Club of Denton, Inc and then “first manufactured in the United States of America First Tidewater Publishers printing 1991; third printing 1993”.

I couldn’t find many details about that but it looks like it was originally published by the Woman’s Club of Denton (a town on the Easter Shore of Maryland) and then it was popular enough it was reprinted almost 10 years later by a larger press. The acknowledgments page references “club members and friends” who submitted recipes and served as proofreaders, Peggy Blades for the illustrations, and the County Commissioners of Caroline County for allowing them to use photographs from the Caroline County Visual History Collection. I don’t know what changes happened between it being a Woman’s Club publication and the acquisition by Tidewater Publishers but I am considering this a 1980s cookbook.

There is a ton of recipes inside, and if I had to guess, they did more than just proofread because many of the directions are written in a similar way although some do include notes like “delicious warm”. The recipes are all pretty straightforward and don’t call for a lot of convenience ingredients.

There are a lot of seafood recipes, as to be expected, but also a good-sized game section with recipes for things like “jugged hare”, wild goose, and diamondback terrapin stew. The Eastern Shore does have a long history of small game hunting so it makes sense. There are some duplicate recipes (six for crab imperial) but they aren’t identical. A variety of desserts from Arkansas Fudge cake to Janet’s Sauerkraut cake. Baltimore and Maryland in general had a large German immigrant population over a hundred years and sauerkraut recipes abound.

We made a crab imperial recipe from this book. You can find that recipe here.