½ pint whipping cream
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon brandy
Heat the oven to 400 degrees. Partly bake the pie shell on the middle oven rack for about 10 minutes until it looks set.
In a food processor, blend the pumpkin, sugar, spices, and salt for one minute. In a heavy saucepan, cook this pumpkin mixture at a simmer, stirring constantly, for about 5 minutes.
Remove pumpkin from the heat and stir in the cream and milk. Whisk eggs to combine whites and yolks and blend thoroughly into the pumpkin mixture. Pour this into the pie shell, adding any extra filling after the pie has baked for about 5 minutes.
Bake the pie on the lower oven rack for about 20 minutes and prepare the praline. In a small bowl, combine the flour, sugar, and butter and stir in the pecans. Remove the pie from the oven and spoon the pecan mixture in a circle around the edge of the pie, inside the crust, and return it to the oven. Continue baking for about 10 minutes more until the filling is puffed and wiggles very slightly when the pie is gently shaken. Cool on a wire rack.
Whip the cream and sugar together until stiff, then stir in the brandy. When the pie is completely cool, mound the cream on top, inside the ring of pecans. Serve right away or refrigerate. Serves 6 to 8.
*Freshly ground cinnamon and cloves are best, but spice straight from the jar will do.
MAINS & SIDES
• • •
Eastern Shore Breakfast Pudding
Eggs, cheddar, ham or sausage, and bread baked together in the rich tradition of English savory puddings. This rib-sticking main course is equally delicious in a vegetarian rendition.
4 thick slices white bread, torn into quarters
¾ pound cooked ham, thinly sliced and chopped (or 1 pound sausage meat, cooked and drained)
1 cup sharp cheddar cheese, grated
½ medium onion, minced
1 sweet red pepper, diced
1 tablespoon olive oil
6 eggs
2 cups milk
¼ teaspoon salt
Black and red pepper to taste
Pinch of nutmeg
Parsley to garnish
Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter a deep 8 x 8 inch baking dish. Lay bread in the dish, covering the bottom, and top with the ham or sausage and cheese. In a small pan, sauté the onion and red pepper in oil until fragrant and softened, about 5 minutes, and layer on top of the cheese. Whisk together the eggs and milk, salt, peppers, and nutmeg. Pour the mixture over the bread, meat, vegetables, and cheese.
Bake for about one hour, until the pudding is puffed, firm, and golden brown. Tent with foil if necessary to prevent too much browning.
Cut into four squares, garnish with parsley, and serve along with Old Bay potatoes (below), steamed asparagus, and broiled tomatoes. You shouldn’t see a hungry guest again until dinnertime.
Note: For vegetarians, substitute for the meat a cup each of lightly steamed broccoli cut into small florets and thinly sliced, sautéed zucchini—both well drained. Serves 4.
• • •
Old Bay Potatoes
A zesty take on home fries.
1 pound red-skinned potatoes
¼ cup Bay Spice*
¼ cup canola oil
salt and pepper
Boil the potatoes, covered, in a pot of salted water until a knife easily pierces the potatoes but they are still firm, about 20 to 30 minutes. Drain and cool or refrigerate overnight. Cut the potatoes into halves or quarters, making 1-inch pieces. pour the Bay spice into a shallow dish and dredge the potatoes to coat them.
Heat oil in a medium-size frying pan, add potatoes, and cook, turning until all sides are brown, about 10 minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serves 4.
*Old Bay Seasoning can be purchased or you can make your own, as below.
• • •
Bay Spice
You can easily mix up Bay Spice yourself, since the McCor-mick Company generously gives the ingredients for its classic on the side of the box. The proportions are ours.
Stir together I tablespoon coarse salt with the following ground spices: 2 teaspoons paprika, 1/8 teaspoon cloves, and I teaspoon each of allspice, bay laurel, black pepper, cayenne pepper, cardamom, celery seed, ginger, mace, and mustard seed. It tastes even better if you grind the whole spices yourself.
• • •
Royal Oak Fried Chicken
According to legend, the aroma from the frying pans in which Royal Oak pullets were “assuming a beautiful brown” drew the British into St. Michaels, during the War of 1812 and “as part of the investigation,” they shelled the town. From Tales of Old Maryland, by J.H.K. Shannahan Jr., 1907.
1 chicken, about 3 pounds, cut into 8 pieces
4 cups buttermilk
1 cup flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
1 cup canola oil
Wash and pat dry the chicken pieces and place them in a large bowl. Pour buttermilk over the chicken, cover, and refrigerate for 8 hours to overnight. In a shallow bowl, mix together flour, salt, and pepper. Remove chicken from the buttermilk and dredge the pieces in the flour mixture. Pat firmly to remove any extra flour.
Heat the oil in a large cast-iron pan until hot, but not smoking. Place chicken pieces skin side down, 3 or 4 at a time, in the oil. Cook about 10 minutes on a side, until the chicken turns golden brown and is cooked through. Remove to paper towels to drain. Serve warm or at room temperature with Southern green beans, below, and cornbread. Serves 4.
• • •
Southern Green Beans
Southerners will cry over vegetables cooked the traditional way. Susie, the best of friends, shared the secret.
6 slices bacon, cut in 2-inch strips
2 onions, sliced
1 pound green beans, stems removed
salt and pepper to taste
2 tablespoons sugar
OPTIONAL
1 cup diced potatoes and 1 cup corn kernels
Sauté the bacon and onions in a large saucepan until the bacon is crisp. Drain away fat, if you wish. Add the beans, season with salt and pepper, and cover with water. Simmer, covered, for a long time, 1 to 2 hours, depending how much patience you have.
Add the sugar, optional potatoes and corn, and simmer 30 minutes more. Serves 4 to 6.
• • •
Green Tomatoes
Green tomatoes have a beautiful lemony overtone. If you don’t see them at a farmers market, ask because sometimes they’re just being kept out of sight until they ripen. If you can’t get green tomatoes, very firm red ones cooked this way are also tasty.
4 medium-sized green tomatoes, sliced ¼ inch thick, cores discarded
1 tablespoon sugar
salt and pepper to taste
1/3 cup cornmeal
1/3 cup flour
½ cup canola oil
Sprinkle sugar, salt, and pepper over tomato slices. In a shallow dish, stir together the cornmeal, flour, more salt and pepper, and dredge the tomatoes. Press the coating firmly to the tomatoes. Heat ¼ cup oil in a skillet and when hot but not smoking, add the slices a few at a time. Cook about 3 minutes on each side, until a golden-brown crust forms and the tomatoes are slightly softened and juicy. Add more oil to the pan as needed to fry the remaining tomatoes. Wonderful with eggs, ham, and toast. Serves 4.
ON THE PORCH
• • •
Mint Juleps
All you need for this traditional Southern emblem of hospitality is a handful of fresh mint, spirits, sugar, ice, and friends to share it.
4 teaspoons superfine or confectioner’s sugar, plus extra to taste
20 mint sprigs, tough stems removed
water
finely crushed ice
bourbon or rye
In a shallow dish, mash the leaves of 16 mint sprigs with a spoon and combine with the sugar. Divide the mint sugar among 4 eight-ounce glasses—tall, narrow ones if you have them. Add enough water to cover the
sugar and stir. Pour in a couple of ounces of the spirits until the glass is about a quarter full. You can stir in a little extra sugar now if you like. Fill the glasses to the top with crushed ice and decorate with the remaining mint. Stir again and serve. Happy thoughts!
Eight Good Reasons to Start a Bed-and-Breakfast and Seven Bad Ones
OF ALL THE REASONS PEOPLE GIVE FOR WANTING TO START a bed-and-breakfast or acquire an existing one, few will hold up over time.
If your current job is running you into the ground and you long for a career change to make life easier, it is better to avoid the hospitality industry. If you enjoy socializing and expect that running a bed-and-breakfast will be an unending party with like-minded guests, the way the glossy magazine ads tell it, disappointment awaits you. If you’re retiring and want a little something to do, you’ll find yourself far busier than you ever intended, unless of course all you hope for is to rent out an extra room for occasional companionship. Even here, you could be in for disappointment because many guests will prefer to be left alone.
There are enticing reasons to persevere and if they speak to you, a bed-and-breakfast could be the right move.
EIGHT GOOD REASONS
Lifestyle
This is the chief reason many satisfied bed-and-breakfast owners cite for getting into the business. With two partners living and working together rather than traveling to jobs in different directions on different schedules, you can lead a more organic existence, a life closer to home. If, for example, you grow herbs and flowers for the guests, you can enjoy them, too. In other words, you get to spend time together in a setting that you would choose for vacation.
Money
Another good reason for going ahead. Instead of just sitting there, your house makes money for you. There can also be tax benefits to starting and running a bed-and-breakfast. Opportunities still exist, as well, to find a fixer-upper bargain in a town that has not yet turned around and develop it into a bed-and-breakfast. The opening of a bed-and-breakfast can be one of the first signs of an area’s revitalization.
A Green Business
With the majority of bed-and-breakfasts housed in buildings over seventy-five years old, this can be the means to save a historic home from demolition. According to Jay Karen, president of the Professional Association of Innkeepers International, studies show that bed-and-breakfasts are a leading source for the preservation of historic houses in this country. If the structure requires modernization to the heating, electrical, and other systems, there are additional opportunities to benefit the environment and decrease the structure’s carbon footprint. If period furnishings are part of the plan, further green savings are possible when you purchase used or antique furniture.
Be the Boss
You are in charge, you set the tone, decide when and how you will work, and when you will take time off.
Share Treasured Recipes
The opportunity to share what you do well can be a surprise benefit of the bed-and-breakfast business. Consider the cooking that your family and friends take for granted—a whole new audience awaits.
Show Off Your Decorating Skills
Here, too, many people will see and enjoy the results of your work. Equipping and decorating a bed-and-breakfast also offers a great excuse to shop for antiques and visit yard sales and auctions. Now it’s a valid business activity.
Meet Interesting People
Bed-and-breakfasts generally self-select educated, affluent, and discerning guests. Many of them say they just want a nicer place to stay, a more refined experience, more accommodating of the individual and more interesting than a commercial hotel. These tend to be interesting people themselves and people with pleasing social skills.
Learn New Things
This may be the best of all reasons to run a bed-and-breakfast. With a variety of guests passing through your doors, it would be almost impossible not to learn something from almost everyone. A boat captain, noticing the heat from our commercial range, showed Hugo how to shut it down and light it as needed, the way they do on boats. A contractor explained how to insulate the inaccessible eaves of an old house. A visitor from South Carolina suggested jasmine for the garden because it thrives in summer heat and humidity. Other guests discovered an eating place open after all the restaurants have closed, where the food is excellent. A potter noticed the clay soil around our garage and asked if he could take some home. We gave him plastic bags, he shoveled up chunks of the clay, wet them down with the garden hose, and departed. Next thing I knew, a package arrived containing two small bowls, glazed deep blue and green on the rims, with the natural, unadorned clay showing below. An English professor gave us an informative volume of essays about the bay. One morning after breakfast, two dance instructors taught everyone the rudiments of the rumba.
On the purely practical side, running a business like this teaches efficiencies of planning and time management that make “normal” life easier. A formal, three-course breakfast for twelve? No problem. A garden scheme for the walkways that looks good all year—simple. Pansies bloom in our climate from fall to spring and begonias from spring to fall. In the past I worked ten times harder in the garden with a lot less to show for it: Now it was necessary to discover what would contribute to a dependable, pleasing ambience with minimal labor and expense.
AND SEVEN BAD ONES
Reasons why you should not start or acquire a bed-and-breakfast are the other face of the very reasons for going forward.
Lifestyle
Leading a work life closer to home means that the stresses can spill over into your private life, with work becoming the only, and seemingly inescapable, reality. Burnout is high. Everyone in the business for any length of time emphasizes the importance of taking breaks away from the workplace, especially if you live at the bed-and-breakfast, which is a requirement in some areas for licensing.
Among those who open a bed-and-breakfast, approximately a third leave by five years, another third are out of business by ten years, and a committed third last for twenty years or longer. The average length of bed-and-breakfast ownership is seven years.
Money
Yes, your house as a bed-and-breakfast will bring in money, but the high cost of real estate means it is harder than in the past to make a go of a bed-and-breakfast. It used to be estimated that you needed five rooms to “make money,” including living expenses and paying a mortgage. Now the figure more often given is ten rooms, depending on the surroundings, competition, and overall economy of the region where your B&B is situated.
Every day hundreds of bed-and-breakfasts are offered for sale, typically ranging from about $300,000 for a small one in northern Michigan to a bed-and-breakfast with seven rooms in prime Vermont tourist territory for $1.3 million. In New York the range is even greater and you can find wide choice all over the country from $800,000 to $2 million.
The average price charged per night for a room at a bed-and-breakfast in this country is $144, according to the Professional Association of Innkeepers International. With many amenities and a highly desirable resort setting, rooms at a smaller number of establishments, as for example on Martha’s Vineyard or the California coast, can run as much as $300 to $400 a night. Even at that level, the arithmetic is sobering. How many nights a year will you have to rent the rooms to pay your bills?
Be the Boss
Yes, you are the boss but only up to a point. It can be a challenge to meet guests’ expectations and highly demanding guests can push you to your limit if you let them. There is technique and art to determining when to say yes or no, and how to say it. When a family of five shows up on your doorstep in a late-night storm, will you squeeze three extra guests into a room they reserved for two? Will you serve coffee at four-thirty in the morning for a guest who likes coffee then? Will you grant a partial refund to someone who passes up breakfast? No, we learned to answer this question. Breakfast is a courtesy that accompanies the room.
Over time any chink in your policies will be detecte
d and challenged. Long after we thought we had heard it all came a request to serve breakfast at midnight and another guest asking if his son, who was being married nearby, could come over with the groomsmen to dress for the wedding. All right, we said, never guessing that they would take over the parlor and front porch, to the great amusement of the neighbors. At the post office the next day, Hugo had some explaining to do. “We saw your front porch filled up with half-naked men,” Francine commented. “What was going on?”
A colleague in Arizona had a guest who came to breakfast dressed in a jaw-dropping nightgown, one problem we haven’t encountered yet. When a guest did ask not long ago if she could come down to breakfast in her pajamas, I agreed because there were no other guests staying that night. In the morning she turned up in heavy flannel pajamas decorated with teddy bears, more presentable than some in their street clothes.
Share Treasured Recipes
Many will appreciate your finest; a few won’t. Some will request breakfast and leave it untouched. Some will have dietary restrictions, which is fine if you’re told in advance, impossibly rude if you’re informed as you are serving. People with restrictions generally know that asking in advance for a special meal helps ensure that they will get it. Those few guests who might come your way with a political agenda about food will try your patience.
The House at Royal Oak Page 19