| Abstract: |
By local author Henry Bonner. This book is not a cookbook in the true sense of the word, but rather a freewheeling peon to the foods available to the settlers of Maryland and their generational kin, and their ingenuity over the years in finding ways to cook these foods and make them palatable, and enjoyable This book is a discussion of the outside and inherited influences that shaped this cookery. And it is a book about hunger, humanity, hospitality, sustainability, gluttony, snobery, presumption, and taste. |
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| Footnotes: |
Food and how it is prepared is part of community’s the mythology and folklore, because it is handed down, thus part of its history and its cultural heritage. The anthropologists use the term foodways to describe the interrelationship between Man, his society, his environment and what and how he eats to sustain.
This book is about the foodways of St. Mary’s County, a 367 square mile estuarine peninsula on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay, bracketed on the north by the Patuxent River and on the South by the Potomac River. It is blessed by a relatively temperate climate It is also blessed with an extraordinary history, emblematic of America’s growth and change, and now, at the beginning of the new milennium, it is going through its second social dislocation (the first being the Civil War) as a microcosm of America, which is the why of writing this book before this 350 year old heritage is lost.
AVAILABILITY: That Sweet Land is available at all of the County Museum Stores, the St. Mary’s campus bookstore, and at Bay Books in the Wildwood Shopping Center, California, Maryland. It is also available directly from the Author ( 301-863-2498 ). The price at all outlets is $15.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mr. Bonner has had a long and checkered career in the spy business, textiles, publishing and hotels. It was the latter career that brought him to St. Mary’s County for the first time in 1972. Even though the project-an Inn & Conference Center at St. Mary’s City-eventually folded, Henry had fallen in love with the county and decided to retire here in 1985. His retirement was short-lived. In 1989 he found himself in the role of Director of the Sotterley Mansion Foundation. In 1990 he also gained the position of Executive Director of the Southern Maryland Museum Association. In 1994 he founded the Maryland Association of History Museums. He left Sotterly in 1992 and in 1997 became the Director of the Patuxent River Naval Air Museum. He retired from the aforementioned roles in 2002 at which time he began to write That Sweet Land.
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