The holidays are considered the sweetest time of the year for many reasons. Where festive food is concerned, this is the time to eat, drink, and be merry. The always-sudden abundance of delectable desserts that becomes so profuse and plentiful throughout the holiday season is evidence of that. It may even inspire you to try your hand at baking up your own decadent delights.
Among the myriad sweet treats to pick and choose from, you may not have realized just how many confectionary classics have regional roots foundational to the Mid-Atlantic. From cookies to cakes, pies to other savory sweets, in this Flashback Friday Feature, I’m highlighting 10 tasty desserts and the stories behind their surprisingly local origins.
Baltimore Peach Cake
While admittedly more of a summer thing, baking up the original Baltimore Peach Cake may provide a welcome alternative to those infamous holiday fruitcakes everyone dreads. Recipes for this fluffy, yeasty cake concoction, topped with layers of sliced peaches, can be traced back to at least the 1880s. While the original recipe is believed to have originated with Baltimore City’s German population, the statewide surplus of locally grown peaches throughout the 19th century made it especially popular elsewhere as well, including St. Michaels where it was reportedly eaten at a St. Michaels Day celebration in West Schuetzen Park as early as 1884.
Fudge
The term “fudge” predates our common understanding of fudge as a contested confection. The word originated sometime during the 17th century as a derivative of the verb “fadge,” which means “to fit together clumsily.” Phrases like “fudging the truth” have since come to be used frequently when denoting a lie or untruth.
The candy commonly coined “fudge” is often associated with 19th-century U.S. college culture. But it, too, is believed to have originated in the vicinity of Baltimore, Maryland. As the popular story goes, fudge was an accidental creation resulting in a confectioner’s mishap while attempting to bake up a batch of French caramels during the late 1800s. In short, he “fudged up” and created a new alternate form of confectionary mastery in its stead—fudge. Recipes and advertisements for fudge in Baltimore date back to at least the 1880s.
Marble Cake
The traditional bi-colored marble cake or “Marmorkuchen” originated in Germany. Per convention, it’s long consisted of a yeasty sweet bread baked in kugelhopf (Bundt) formation.
Its emergence in the United States is another example of a German cultural rendition being adopted into the universal mainstream. These favored and familiar cakes remain popular throughout the Mid-Atlantic states and have since grown in prominence in other regions across the United States. Their most likely American emergence can be traced back to the Mennonite community of Rockingham County, Virginia. The word “marble cake” used to describe them first appeared in an 1859 issue of the Illinois State Chronicle.
Peanut Pie
Having first been introduced to the New World by African slaves in the 18th century, peanuts have grown in prominence and popularity as an ingredient, often incorporated into Southern cuisine. It has also emerged into being a pretty big deal in common dishes associated with the Tidewater region, which includes the Atlantic Plain (east of the Atlantic Seaboard, the state of Delaware, the Delmarva Peninsula, Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Southern Maryland, Eastern Virginia, and other surrounding areas). So, it should come as no surprise that a dessert incorporating these well-loved lentils would be a popular choice for residents in Virginia and North Carolina in particular.
What a peanut pie comprises is self-explanatory. Many renditions are almost synonymous with those of pecan pies, exchanging the obvious choice of nut in the baking process. Noted differences do exist per recipe, however.
Sand Tarts
It’s sugar cookie meets butter cookie with a nutty (pecan or almond), sandy kick that sets the stage for these traditional ultra-thin holiday cookies. While their American presence has long been associated with the Pennsylvania Dutch community, the true nature of their origins is unknown. Many older European cultures claim to have invented them, but our American version is distinctly that.
Shoofly Pie
Here’s another sweet treat of Pennsylvania Dutch Country-derived origins. The quintessential American pie (aside from apple pie, which is debatable in more ways than one), shoofly pie was born during the 1870s, coinciding with the nation’s Centennial celebration of the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. It was, in fact, originally named “Centennial Cake” and did not contain a crust. The latter was added sometime during the 1880s to make it easier to eat with coffee as a breakfast food.
Aside from the added crust, the ingredients for Shoofly pie have largely remained the same throughout the years. They’re made using those easily accessible “leftover ingredients” like flour, sugar, molasses, and spices. The absence of eggs makes it especially appealing as a wintertime delicacy to top off a scrumptious holiday meal. While the origins of its current name are not confirmed, the popular belief is that “shoofly” comes from the expressed action of constantly having to “shoo” flies away from the pie’s molasses-induced sweetness.
Smith Island Cake
This may just be the most renowned regional dessert of all—Maryland’s famed and fabled Smith Island Cake. Believed to have originated sometime during the 1800s, the tale behind their tantalizing cultivation is born out of the loving effort by the wives of oystermen to provide needed substance and a tasty energy boost to their hard-working husbands.
Smith Island Cakes have since taken on different flavors and renditions. They’re classically characteristic, however, as comprising multiple yellow pancake-thin layers of cake slathered together by chocolate frosting, which is also used to garnish off the final, finished product. The Smith Island Cake was officially named Maryland’s “state dessert” on October 1, 2008.
Sticky Buns
There’s nothing new about these appetizing, antiquated, doughy buns. They’ve been around since at least the Middle Ages in Europe. As for their presence in the New World, they can again be traced to Pennsylvania Dutch Country traditions where they were formerly known as “Schnecken.” This translates to “snail” for their distinctive shapes, although we can’t overlook their stickiness as playing a role in their naming as well. Sticky buns remain popular throughout most regions in the Mid-Atlantic along with other places throughout the nation.
Sugar Cookies
Sugar cookies may seem simplistic, but they make meaningful holiday memories and can even be custom-crafted into so many different shapes and themes to suit any occasion.
Sugar cookies have been a part of North American culture since at least the mid-1700s. Created by German Protestant settlers, they were originally known as the “Nazareth cookie,” as they originated in what would later become Nazareth, Pennsylvania.
White Potato Pie
Even if you hail from Maryland, you may have never heard of this once-popular classic dessert. Its origin goes hand-in-hand with the state’s once-abundant cash crop of tobacco. Eastern Shore farmers had long been utilizing crop rotation methods, eventually opting for white potatoes as a viable means to fill the need as tobacco’s other half. But that left a lot of unused potatoes. That’s when culinary creativity crept in, and a new experimental dessert emerged—the white potato pie.
The white potato pie is the byproduct of mashed potatoes, enhanced by sugar, spice, eggs, and butter, all mixed and baked into a conventional pie crust. Its medium and presentation are comparable to the consistency of pumpkin or sweet potato pies. The earliest published recipe for white potato pie dates back to 1859. It appears in the Baltimore-published book Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers.
These are just a few of the tasty, tantalizing treats that have graced the greater Mid-Atlantic region. Some are obscure, while others are iconic and defining. But each option highlighted here poses the potential for making a most mouthwatering sendoff to this year’s holiday meal.