Lesly Sajak Photographer, Pat’s wife
Though her married name may be Polish, Lesly Sajak grew up in Annapolis in a large, extended Italian family. “We always used to get together on Sundays,” she says, recalling visits to Baltimore to see her aunt and uncles. “And we always brought the salad.” Although the family has now gotten smaller, she says, they still try to see each other most Sundays at her mother’s house. And antipasti is still on the menu.
Sajak’s version of antipasti has changed little from her mother’s or grandmother’s recipe. Sometimes she’ll use red wine vinegar in the salad dressing; sometimes she reaches for the balsamic. If she’s making the salad for company, she’ll make sure she has every ingredient, but if the antipasti is for family, she’ll let a few things slide—but only a few. “It has to have the olives, lettuce, tomato, pepperoncini, Italian meats, and garbanzo beans [Sajak’s favorite ingredient] to make it an antipasti,” she says. Now that’s Italian.
Linnell Bowen Executive director, Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts
“My mother collected people over her dinner table,” says Linnell Bowen, and for the people at Janice Robinson’s table, crab cakes were often the lure.
Although Bowen’s Southern mother thought picking crabs was “barbaric,” after the family moved to Maryland, her mother embraced crab cakes like a native.
“She just put in a dab of this and a dab of that,” explains Bowen, who often prepares crab cakes for dinner parties. “I only learned to make them with great difficulty.”
To save others the trouble, Bowen has written down the perfected recipe, which was included in a goody bag for a recently married nephew so that his new New York relatives could replicate a taste of the Eastern Shore.
Linnell Bowen’s Mother’s Crab Cakes
Joanne Rich Co-owner and proprietress, Inn at Huntingfield Creek, Rock Hall
As an innkeeper, Joanne Rich has what she calls “a pretty nice repertoire of desserts” in her recipe stash, and her chocolate bread pudding recipe is a result of two of them. After cutting up a batch of her grandmother’s German chocolate cake to use in a recipe for macadamia nut chocolate cake towers, Rich found herself with a pile of leftover little diamond-shaped pieces of cake. “This cake has always been so absolutely delicious,” says Rich, “and it would have been a crime to throw it all away. Or it meant [my husband], Jim, and I would have had to stuff our faces full of these diamonds. None of these were good options.”
So Rich put the cake diamonds in the freezer, only to pull them out when she came up with her chocolate bread pudding recipe. “It’s unadulterated bliss,” she says of the dessert. “Lovely and simple with a molten, chocolate cake consistency.”
Joanne Rich’s Chocolate Bread Pudding
Dave Harp Chesapeake Bay photographer, http://www.chesapeakephotos.com
Dave Harp procured this recipe for bluefish dip during a visit with his college roommate and his wife at their home in Maine. “He’s a real avid fisherman,” Harp says of his friend, “and we ate it at their house and thought, ‘This is just great.’”
Harp started making it for his own parties and found that folks gobbled it up. Though he concedes that his wife, Barbara, does most of the cooking, this recipe gets him into the kitchen. “What I like about it is that a lot of people don’t like to eat bluefish,” says Harp. “It’s not as popular as rockfish or flounder. But this dip is just so good, and it uses a fish that isn’t as expensive or popular. So it’s sort of a two-fer, you know?”
Dave Harp’s Montauk Bluefish Dip
Max Onder Proprietor, Karavan: Treasures from Turkey
Max Onder remembers the stuffed grape leaves of his youth in Ordu, Turkey. “In the spring, we would collect wild grape leaves,” he recalls, “and my mom and I would just sit down and make yaprak sarma together. It was like a fun thing to do. We would make tons of them.”
After Onder moved to the States, he re-learned how to make the grape leaves, courtesy of his friend Haluk Kantar, who owns Cazbar restaurant in Baltimore. Now the grape leaves are a mandatory dish for all of his parties.
Max Onder’s Turkish Grape Leaves (Yaprak Sarma)
Renee Brooks Catacalos Community outreach coordinator, Future Harvest: Chesapeake Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture
After a Foreign Service stint in Turkey, Renee Brooks Catacalos thought she knew how to make moussaka. Then she met her late father-in-law, Louis Catacalos.
Catacalos remembers Louis, a Texas restaurateur, as “kind of Old World, first-generation, Greek-American, big hearted, generously hospitable.” He greeted people with, “Hello, come on in. You want a little soup?” she recalls. And he made a great moussaka that was a little different from what Catacalos had learned in Turkey. “It had a béchamel soufflé topping that’s a Greek thing,” Catacalos says. “It’s a very luxurious addition to moussaka.”
Catacalos’ father-in-law passed away soon after the two shared a cooking session in his kitchen, where he showed her how to make his baklava as well as his moussaka. Now she makes it in high season when eggplants are plentiful and at Easter. “Whenever we make it,” Catacalos says, “we think of him.”
Renee Brooks Catacalos Greek-style Moussaka
Margaret Julia Howard Vendor, Anne Arundel County Farmers Market
Margaret Julia Howard has been selling her toothsome baked goods on Saturdays at the Anne Arundel County Farmers Market for more than 15 years. “I don’t sell anything I don’t eat,” says Howard. “That’s just my principle. If I don’t like it, I’m not going to fix it, and these are things I fix for my family all the time.”
While many of Howard’s recipes come from her voluminous cookbook collection, her gingerbread recipe is one that’s long been in her family, passed down to her from her mother. “[My mother] didn’t make it too often,” Howard says, “but in the fall, you could always count on a batch or two.”
Margaret Julia Howard’s Old-Fashioned Gingerbread
Dawn Costigan ECO Radio host, WRNR, 103.1 FM
WRNR’s Dawn Costigan is a self-proclaimed “avid gardener [who] tends to get a little tomato crazy” when it comes to heirloom varietals. To use up and preserve the surplus at the end of the season, she adapted a recipe for oven-candied summer tomatoes created by another radio personality, Lynne Rossetto Kasper, host of American Public Media’s “The Splendid Table.”
“I love gourmet food, but I’m not the one to crank it out,” admits Costigan, who loves the “simplicity” of this recipe. The tomatoes can be frozen indefinitely and used throughout the year anywhere you might use sun-dried tomatoes. Costigan uses them on broiled fish and homemade pizza—“bachelorette cooking,” as Costigan modestly describes it—anything but dull.
Dawn Costigan’s Oven-Candied Summer Tomatoes
Luc Fouquet Co-owner, Hudson & Fouquet Salon, Annapolis
Luc Fouquet brought a taste of France to Annapolis years ago when he first made his mother’s chocolate mousse for a party “and everyone jumped on it.” Now it has become tradition, he says. “Every time I have a party it is expected.”
The key to Fouquet’s mousse is its simplicity. “People think you have to add sugar,” he says, though it’s not necessary. “It’s just eggs,” he points out. “And dark chocolate is good for you. ... It’s almost a healthy dessert.”
Luc Fouquet’s ‘Famous’ Chocolate Mousse
Lisa Hillman President, Anne Arundel Medical Center Foundation, senior vice president, Anne Arundel Health System
Lisa Hillman’s busy schedule allows little time for serious cooking. But when time and an occasion allow, she pulls out all the stops with this lemon cheesecake, a recipe she says she’s had “for so many years—at least 25—that it’s quite faded, and I cannot recall where it came from originally, but likely Bon Appétit.”
The cake takes a long time to make, admits Hillman, who bakes it maybe two or three times a year. She likes to serve it on a footed glass cake plate, where “it usually brings lots of wows” and requests for the recipe.
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