On the narrow streets of Fells Point, around the circles in Annapolis and lining the avenues of Mount Vernon, buildings erected in Maryland's earliest days still stand, giving locals and tourists alike the opportunity to imagine what life looked like here centuries ago.
But architecture tells only one part of the region's story. What happened behind those facades, especially in their kitchens and dining rooms, offers a deeper glimpse at what it was like to live in the Mid-Atlantic during bygone eras.
This fall, numerous events — from talks and tours to interactive demonstrations — explore the history of the Mid-Atlantic from a culinary perspective. These deep dives into what our forebears farmed, foraged, cooked and ate provide insight not just into how they lived, but into the role food plays in our lives today.
"Food and drink has so much of a cultural and historic tie to it," said Jeff Swedarsky, the president of Historic Annapolis Food Tours. "It's really cool when you start digging through the layers of what people ate and drank in different areas and how that's tied together."
Swedarsky's tours and other local events look at the roles food played in individuals' lives and how it influenced society as a whole.
"Think about the location of Annapolis and its proximity to the water — the Severn [River] and the Chesapeake Bay," he said. "As a port city, fishing was something very important, and the acquisition of fish and oysters helped drive industries. The spice trade and different fruits showed up at port cities, too. Things made their way from the West Indies to here."
Spike Gjerde, the James Beard Award-winning chef behind Baltimore-area restaurants such as Woodberry Kitchen, shares Swedarsky's interest. Later this month, Gjerde will partner with Washington chef Jeremiah Langhorne on a Smithsonian Associates-sponsored talk about Mid-Atlantic food, including a look at the culinary history of the region.
For Gjerde, exploring the history of local foodways and understanding the raw ingredients traditionally used in the region have helped inform his cooking.
"There are real insights that can be provided to the food we're cooking today by how it was done 100 or 200 or even, around the Chesapeake, 400 years ago," he said. "That's one of the reasons I got interested in traditional recipes and techniques — because they could really tell me something about the ingredients I was working with."
Gjerde counts among his influences culinary historians like Michael Twitty, a scholar of African-American and Jewish food studies who writes the popular blog Afroculinaria, and William Woys Weaver, an expert in Pennsylvania's food history.
Over the past several decades, Gjerde said, the food traditions of the Chesapeake have received less attention than those of other regions, including the Carolinas, the Cajun and Creole communities, or the Pennsylvania Dutch. But he sees that changing, thanks in part to historians like Twitty, who is from Maryland.
"Michael Twitty was the first person to really get me to think that there is something here and it is kind of unique," he said. "One important part of that is that it's the first place where these disparate traditions are woven together to create something new. He was the guy who got me to think of the Chesapeake tradition as 'Creolized,' including Native American, enslaved African and Anglo-European traditions coming together because of economic and climatic conditions."
Gjerde is quick to point out that his interest in food history is, ultimately, driven by the food he cooks today. "I'm not a historian or cultural anthropologist," he said. "But to have this understanding has been really useful, which is a cool thing. At the end of the day, I try to put some of this knowledge and these ideas to work for us, our growers and our guests."
Chefs aren't the only people intrigued by the ingredients used in years past. "People always end up looking back," says Marie Magnello, the media/marketing chair of Slow Food Baltimore.
The food advocacy organization has partnered with Two Boots Farm in Hampstead on the coming PawPaw Festival, which focuses on the pawpaw (or papaw), a tropical-like fruit that was historically popular but never cultivated for mass consumption.
"We find people are really interested in these noncultivated, heirloom types of foods," she said.
In addition to learning about ingredients of the past, understanding food history also involves exploring the techniques used to farm and cook, such as hearth cooking.
At the Benjamin Banneker Historical Park and Museum in Catonsville, hearth cooking demonstrations using period-appropriate ingredients — some of which are grown on-site — help tell the story of what 18th century life was like for Banneker, a free African-American who was lauded for his contributions as a naturalist, surveyor and astronomer.
Volunteer period interpreters like Reed Hellman and Julia Pallozzi-Ruhm work as hearth chefs, preparing food in a manner consistent with how Banneker and his sisters would have cooked.
"We put together meals that are representative of the kinds of foods Benjamin Banneker would have been familiar with, cooked and eaten back in 1790," said Hellman. "We try to use all the appropriate recipes. We cook on an open hearth. We try to make sure all the meals are period-correct, geographically correct — something that would have been eaten in this area — and seasonally correct."
This level of detail can be eye-opening for visitors, especially children, he said.
"We get kids who have never been in a house without a microwave," he said. "For them to look around and not only not see a microwave, but no kitchen sink, refrigerator or toilet — this is a discovery for them."
Learning the details of food history sometimes means removing the rose-colored glasses that allow us to romanticize the past, said Kara Mae Harris, author of the Maryland food history blog Old Line Plate.
"It's interesting to see how things get fetishized," she said. "I keep coming across stories about how people died eating ice cream. It could be deadly! You ate fresh and local all the time, but you could get food poisoning and not know anything about it."
For Hellman, exposure to the harsh realities of early American living — and cooking — leads to gratitude.
"I am so thankful every time I open my refrigerator," he said. "That's been a marvelous experience."