Sour Beef

The nights come on earlier. The furnace clicks on. On a humid afternoon, the deep, resonant bell at City Hall sounds the time. It's sour beef's high hour in Baltimore. In the next week, the aged beef from Hickory Chance Farm in Bel Air will be delivered to Zion Lutheran Church in City Hall Plaza, Lexington and Holliday streets in downtown Baltimore. An army of Zion kitchen volunteers will then begin their labors, days at a time. There's the trimming the beef, the marinating, the tubs of flour and riced potatoes.

The nights come on earlier. The furnace clicks on. On a humid afternoon, the deep, resonant bell at City Hall sounds the time. It's sour beef's high hour in Baltimore. In the next week, the aged beef from Hickory Chance Farm in Bel Air will be delivered to Zion Lutheran Church in City Hall Plaza, Lexington and Holliday streets in downtown Baltimore. An army of Zion kitchen volunteers will then begin their labors, days at a time. There's the trimming the beef, the marinating, the tubs of flour and riced potatoes.

BALTIMORE'S SOUR beef and dumpling season isn't long. It follows the last of the crab feasts and darts in, and out, before the oyster roasts rule the winter.Most people here are not even aware of the sauerbraten days. Sour-beef eaters constitute a niche market within the niche market of Baltimore specialty dining. Those who crave the dish are passionate about its merits. Those who disdain it think it ought to be condemned. There's a huge batch of people in between who aren't even sure of what the dish is.It is, of course, a German specialty.

Bertha Sander, a longtime member of Zion Lutheran Church at City Hall Plaza where for years she helped prepare and serve at the church's famous sour beef dinners, died of a cardiac arrest Oct. 19 at Oak Crest Village. She was 101. Bertha Prag, the daughter of farmers, was born and raised in Jagstheim in the Swabia region of southwest Germany. In 1928, she immigrated to Baltimore, where she worked as a governess and during the 1930s in quality control at the old Calvert Distillery in Relay.

THANKS TO the vagaries of the editing process, an obituary I wrote recently on the great Jack Kelbaugh, the fine teacher, scholar and historian of Anne Arundel County, was published lacking a crucial detail. Jack, who died Nov. 15 of a heart attack while discussing Civil War history, was a genuine Marylander. He loved his county, the Chesapeake Bay - and his local delicacies. As a farm lad in Harmans, where his family lived for many years, he gained a respect for the fruits of the soil.

It's always during the last weeks in October when ginger snaps disappear from the shelves of Baltimore supermarkets.The cookies are not being bought for snacks.Instead, they're a preferred ingredient in the sour beef gravy so liberally ladled over marinated beef and homemade potato dumplings at the tables of many a family with German roots."I'm very proud of our gravy. It's smooth as velvet," said Grace E. Fader, fellowship chairperson at United Evangelical Church at East Avenue and Dillon Street.

Gingersnaps always seem to disappear from Baltimore supermarket shelves in the last days of October.The vanishing cookies have nothing to do with an increase in snacking, or with Halloween. Crumbled gingersnaps are the preferred thickening ingredient in the beef gravy so liberally ladled over marinated sour beef and homemade potato dumplings at the tables of many a family in these parts this time of year.It helps to have had a German grandmother, but anyone can enjoy this most unpretentious of Baltimore comfort foods.

The rotary-dial telephone rings in the kitchen of the old Highlandtown church. The caller inquires when the ladies will be holding their annual sour beef and dumpling supper.Devotees of sour beef circle on their calendars the days when local churches serve the dish that so tickles a Baltimorean's taste buds. Eaters devour the marinated beef, potato dumplings and the gravy lovingly prepared by dozens of grandmothers.A church sauerbraten supper is a great attraction for families who have left the old rowhouses for ranchers in Rosedale and Perry Hall, Severna Park and Cockeysville.

November is sour beef and dumplings month in Baltimore.It's the time when more people go to church to eat than to pray. No wonder. My idea of answered prayers is a font of marinaded beef, properly spiced and swimming in that heaven-sent sweet-sour gravy. Add to it the necessary dumplings and you are ready for a fierce winter and a size larger pair of pants.The uninitiated think us sour beef gorgers are nuts. That's fine; let them savor their pasta salad with a side serving of raspberry sauce.

November is the month Baltimoreans go to church to eat rather than to pray.No wonder. My idea of answered prayers is a font of marinated beef, properly spiced and swimming in that heaven-sent sweet-sour gravy. Add to it the necessary dumplings and you are fortified for a fierce winter and a size-larger pair of pants.The church sour beef dinner is a mainstay of the Formstone districts of old Baltimore. This dish, beloved by its converts and shunned by the rest, does not necessarily dominate the church supper menu.

There's a magical Baltimore eating establishment that has nothing to do with a restaurant or family and friends' homes. This time of the year, I crave the church kitchen and those sour beef dinners produced by the hard labors of unheralded volunteer hands. Be warned. This is a difficult date. You must plan ahead; you must not postpone; there can be tiresome lines. And, most of all, you have to like sour beef and dumplings, maybe side dishes of green beans or red cabbage, all served on disposable plates.

Some are made with gingersnap gravy, some have red cabbage on the side, and all the versions come with dumplings or potato pancakes. Sauerbraten, or sour beef, is one of Baltimore's favorite Old World comfort foods. Here's the alphabetical list, with the prices because I thought the range was interesting. *I'm actually giving you 11 restaurants; at the moment one of them is closed for renovations: 1 Burke's Cafe downtown, $12.05 2 Dimitri's on Frederick Road, $16; lunch, $8.50 3 Eichenkranz in Highlandtown, $11.20 4 Josef's in Fallston, $17.95 5 Kibby's on Wilkens Avenue, near St. Agnes Hospital, $13.60 6 Old Stein Inn in Edgewater, $20 7 Parkside Fine Food & Spirits in Lauraville, $15 8 Patrick's in Cockeysville, $16.50 (currently closed for remodeling)

A smoky wood fire sends a clear message that it's time to get serious about the season. I grew up in the city in the 1950s, when wood-burning fireplaces were not common. Coal furnaces, on the other hand, were around but disappearing fast. The 11th month brought its own aromatic reminders in the kitchen, too. November is Baltimore's first true cold month of the fall-winter calendar, and the chefs who kept me happy as a child ratcheted up their menus with enthusiasm.

It was a ritual on fall evenings when the sunlight disappeared a little earlier than the day before. Sour beef night at one of the four churches scattered around the harbor was an occasion when you skipped lunch and left work early. As is the case with so many things that Baltimoreans savor, the dinners weren't easy to find. A church door might have a small flier taped to it; if you were lucky, you might be on a mailing list. More likely, you heard it on the street.

No review of Sanders' Corner can start with anything but its fine covered porch overlooking the woods and fields surrounding Loch Raven Reservoir. Not for nothing do the servers wear T-shirts saying, "Sanders' Corner: That Dam Place." Decked out with striped awnings, tile-topped tables, potted plants and ceiling fans, it's one of Baltimore County's best spaces for eating casually outdoors. A new owner, John Naudain, took over this spring, sprucing the place up and adding curbside pickup, valet parking, delivery and a lounge.

FOOD *** ( 3 STARS) SERVICE *** (3 STARS) ATMOSPHERE ** (2 STARS) Let's face it. Haussner's is a hard act to follow. Not so much because of the food. In its last years, I never heard people say the food was why they ate there. But Haussner's was one of the few restaurants that could be legitimately described as a Baltimore landmark. It was wonderfully fun to be sitting at one of the white-clothed tables, even if your fish was overcooked or the famous strawberry pie didn't have much taste.

There's a magical Baltimore eating establishment that has nothing to do with a restaurant or family and friends' homes. This time of the year, I crave the church kitchen and those sour beef dinners produced by the hard labors of unheralded volunteer hands. Be warned. This is a difficult date. You must plan ahead; you must not postpone; there can be tiresome lines. And, most of all, you have to like sour beef and dumplings, maybe side dishes of green beans or red cabbage, all served on disposable plates.

The Silver Spring Inn just doesn't look like the kind of plac that serves some of the best Sour Beef around. Or does it?Sour Beef is old-time Baltimore. Heavy, filling, intensely delicious if prepared properly. Nothing lite, nothing nouvelle about it.The Silver Spring Inn is also old-time Baltimore, despite its location beyond the Beltway on Belair Road. The inn is a corner bar with dining room attached. Dark, smoky, the kind of place working folks have always stopped at for a few beers on the way home.

It's not a humid morning, but the sidewalk air outside a Highlandtown church kitchen smells tantalizingly of vinegar, onions and cloves, the active agents of what Baltimoreans think of as their own South Conkling Diet. Only the toughest church volunteers would lay out the better part of two weeks for this: the transformation of 700 pounds of eye-round beef into the November sour beef and dumplings banquet that lures staggering lines of customers. An endearing Baltimore tradition? Yes. Also, sadly endangered.

Elli Hein scooped a small pot's worth of brown beef gravy out of a paint bucket and poured it over slices of beef simmering in a nearly full crockpot. She repeated the process yesterday afternoon until the huge oval crockpot, which spanned the width of a banquet table, was full of layer after layer of sauerbraten - sour beef - a crowd favorite at this weekend's 105th annual German Festival in Southwest Baltimore's Carroll Park. Hein is "kitchen chairwoman" of the Baltimore Kickers Club, a 45-year-old German soccer and social group.