Author: Kristina Gaddy / Source: Atlas Obscura
In the library of the Maryland Historical Society, Kara Mae Harris sits at a large table with fragile manuscript pages and her laptop. She taps away, entering recipe after recipe from centuries-old cookbooks, diaries, and handwritten pages into a database of more than 24,000 entries.
She’s not a historian or chef, but she has dedicated thousands of hours to preserving Maryland’s unique culinary traditions, and every week, she tests a recipe and puts the history behind it on her blog, Old Line Plate. Harris enjoys uncovering and sharing history that no one else is talking about. Once she realized the vastness of Maryland’s food history—and that almost no one was singularly focused on keeping a record of it—she’d found her new project.Harris grew up in Maryland outside of Washington, D.C., a place that sometimes loses its identity in an amalgamation of suburbs. She had never contemplated her home state’s culinary identity. “I never thought of Maryland as the South. I didn’t know anyone who did,” she says.
“These books are how I learned Maryland food was even a thing,” Harris adds, as she picks up an issue of the Southern Heritage Cookbook Library. She started reading books like this one since she was interested in cooking, but was surprised when she found recipes from Maryland. She was fascinated by the ephemera and history that the cookbooks offered with each recipe, and she became interested in the foodways of Maryland, a state shaped by its unique geography: on the East Coast, on the line between the North and the South.
“Once I started studying the food, I realized that culinarily, Maryland absolutely is the South,” she says, even though she knows that conflicts with how many people feel about the state.
In 2011, Harris started Old Line Plate (a pun on Maryland’s nickname The Old Line State), and she mostly drew from the cookbook Maryland’s Way, a collection of 18th-century recipes. That led her to more cookbooks available online and recipes in old newspapers, and soon creating a database to keep track of all the recipes took precedence over the blog. Harris loves history, but she also loves data. She believed a database would allow her to more easily analyze trends, trace information, compare and contrast recipes, and then share her findings with anyone who was interested. When she’s not at her full-time job (as a college admissions officer), cooking, or blogging, she goes to the Maryland Historical Society, the Enoch Pratt Free Library, and smaller historical collections in the state to diligently enter recipes into her database.
What she has made should be the envy of most every food historian and librarian. Each recipe entry includes the cookbook it came from, the person who wrote the book, and relevant tags, such as other names for the same recipe or key ingredients. The database is searchable by any of those fields. Harris resurrected the cooking blog in 2015, and has been posting weekly recipes and histories for the last two years, using research from her database.
She recently read that the first appearance of fudge at a Vassar College bake sale (and subsequent popularity across the country) was connected to a recipe derived from Baltimore, Maryland. “After I found out that fudge allegedly is Baltimore-centric, I isolated all of the fudge recipes [in…
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