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Soups are a quintessential Pennsylvania Dutch dish and an excellent manner of extending and expanding the use of meats and vegetables by boiling them for stock.  Soups were so common to the Dutch menu that historians of German and Pennsylvania folkways record the regular presence of a raised soup hearth, a firepit built to hip level into which a stewpot was sunk.  The raised hearth avoided the need to stoop into the firepit and was a much more efficient consumer of firewood.  Broths and soups could be simmered for hours and restocked from the cooking liquids of other dishes.

Love of soup seems to have been a heritable genetic trait in the Weiss household.  Mom-Mom prepared the occasional soup for casual meals, oyster stew and pepper pot among them.  Pop-Pop, although he was very stingy with his utterances of praise, demonstrated his enjoyment of a meal through other cues.  In the case of soup, the especially the noisy slurping that issued from his end of the table gave away his appreciation.  Mom-Mom and Pop-Pop’s son Francis - Geoff’s dad – inherited such inclination for soup making.  When on vacation in the Pennsylvania Pocono Mountains, he would keep a large pot of homemade soup on the stove that was replenished daily with whatever leftovers were available from other meals: lunch meat, spaghetti, cooked hamburger, chopped vegetables, etc.  As kids, Geoff and Pam would ladle a bowl for lunch until one afternoon a massive blue green mold was found covering the surface of the soup.  The contents of the pot were dumped for fear that Francis would simply stir the mold into the soup.  Despite the obvious offensiveness of that experience, Geoff continued to love soup and passed that trait onto Claire.  

Claire remembers making soup with Geoff when she was growing up, a meal that was especially partaken when on family vacation.  Making packaged ramen, although not a Pennsylvania Dutch recipe in any way, was a particular treat.  In jest, Geoff often told Claire that she was “full of soup” when she was being cheeky.  Soup was such a feature of the Weiss household that it took a friend pointing it out many MANY years later for Claire to realize that this phrase was actually the G-rated, kid-friendly version of the phrase “you’re full of sh…”  

To branch out into new soup territory, Claire and Geoff selected Oat Flour Soup, an early roux recipe built from fried flour that can be found in early modern cookery, indeed as early at the late 16th century.  This version of oat flour soup is, however, vegan, a dish that would seem anathema to traditional PA Dutch fare.  Among its features is a stock created by boiling spelt or farrow berries.  This otherwise bland soup is given an extra kick by the addition of herb-infused vinegar.  Meat can be incorporated if sticking to veganism isn’t your thing, and we opted for small turkey meatballs, which actually didn't pair all that well with the oat soup flavor.  They weren't bad, they just weren't a necessary addition.

Salads are also a staple of the Dutch diet.  Households often kept a kitchen garden separate from the other farm commodities to grow fresh produce used for meals and for canning.  April is certainly the beginning of vegetable season, salad greens among the first to be harvested.  The Weisses had salad favorites including dandelion salad with hot bacon dressing, German potato salad, and cucumbers and onions in sour cream dressing.  Pop-Pop, dressed in a linen shirt, bowtie and vest, would often scour the garden lawn for fresh dandelion sprouts.  If the supply of flowers was rich, a batch of dandelion wine was also cooked up.  

Claire and Geoff chose Mushroom Salad for this edition of the blog, remarkably another vegan dish.  This recipe introduced them to herb vinegars—simple vinegars infused with available herbs.  It is a simple condiment for kicking up the flavor of a dish and a brilliant addition to the pantry for any number of uses. 

Here are the recipes for Oat Flour Soup and Mushroom Salad, posted in the Recipes Section.

Cookie baking is one of the iconic signs of the Holiday Season, both for the Dutch and for the Weisses.  With so many choices of cookies, Claire and Geoff picked examples that had some story behind them (if not Weiss-specific stories) and would have broad appeal for our readers.  Consequently, the finalists this year were Apeas Drop Cookies and Lemon Cookies.

The first of the two types of cookies we made are called Apeas, also known as Anis Bleetsche.  These cookies have a particularly apocryphal history.  Fully half of Claire and Geoff’s collection of Pennsylvania Dutch cookbooks offer a recipe for these cookies, augmented with an origin story.  There are as many alternative spellings as there are variations in the recipes, including APs, Apies, Apees, Apice, Epise, Epees and Eepies, even going as far as pain d’epice (gingerbread).  None of the available published recipes, however, include ginger in any form.  Documentation of the preparation of these cookies dates as far back as 1817 and were standard fare in Dutch Country and Philadelphia bakeries.  There are as many origin stories for the name as there are names.  One story attributes the name to the A&P grocery store chain (the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, shortened to A&P), whence ingredients were purchased.  Yet another suggests that anise was commonly used as an ingredient, giving the cookies the full name Anis Platzchen, which were marked with AP to distinguish them from the similar looking 'seed cakes' that had carraway as one of their main ingredients. Perhaps the most recognized story recounts a baker of these cookies named Ann Page who etched her initials into each cookie before baking them and selling them on the streets of Philadelphia.  Variations on the recipe are as numerous. Some include an abundance of butter, others an abundance of eggs, all of them an abundance of sugar.  Some have anise, some are rolled out and baked till crispy, some are drop cookies (made by dropping a small dollop of batter or dough onto the baking sheet), some are formed with cookie cutters.  For Claire and Geoff’s trial attempt, the recipe from Dutch Treats: Heirloom Recipes from Farmhouse Kitchens was selected because of its simplicity.  This recipe is for a drop cookie version, and one that does include the addition of anise seed.  We, however, elected to leave anise out as a flavor that a number of family members do not care for, and replaced it with cardamom.  The resulting cookie was puffy and pillowy, not too sweet and an excellent accompaniment for coffee. 

Lemon Cookies were also drawn from a recipe in Dutch Treats: Lemon Hearts.  These cookies are a lemon variation on the more general category of ‘Sand Tarts,’ which have strong representation in Dutch Country, produced by Dutch families year round.  Sand Tarts get their name from the sugar and spice topping that make their surface sandy, or because they are quite short shortbread cookies with a sandy texture.  They often have a single whole nut or dried fruit piece pressed into their centers.  They are cut with cookie cutters to form their shape (whatever that shape might be).  As for Apeas, the variation within this single type of cookie makes clear that there is no single recipe, but rather as many as there are Dutch families passing down their method from generation to generation.  For the Lemon Hearts (which in our hands became Lemon trees, stars, snow flakes, cookie people, and planes), the distinguishing feature is a lemon shortbread cookie using plenty of butter, sugar and eggs along with a touch of butter milk and lemon zest with a lemon-sugar “sand” on top.  Although heart-shaped cookies are recommended, C&G utilized cookie cutters of various shapes and sizes.  The result was a nice crisp lemony cookie topped with crystalline sugar, augmented with red and green sugar sprinkles for the season.

Here is our version of the recipes for Apeas Drop Cookies and Lemon Cookies, posted in the Recipes Section.

The PA Dutch food that Claire recalls being talked about most within the family while she was growing up is Shoofly Pie.  Not often, but there were the occasional whispers about the apocryphal pastry.  Actually, the name conjured up the song “Shoo Fly, Don't Bother Me” and "There was an Old Lady who Swallowed a Fly"  for Claire, so the pie honestly didn’t hold much attraction.  Alternatively, she mentally pictured the spelling as "Shoefly," suggesting either very unpleasantly stinky footware that had attracted insect attention, or the aftermath of having squished the offending fly on the sole of a sneaker.  Not a great start to make its recommendation.

When Geoff and Claire started the PA Dutch blog, clearly Shoofly Pie was going to be in the early lineup of recipes to be tried.  Such an iconic PA Dutch food with deep family lore made it the second blog entry we put forward, and we tried not one, but both pie varieties - wet bottom and dry bottom.  Again, not names that inspire much appetite.  While Geoff purports to enjoy the pie, Claire was more circumspect in her appreciation.  The pie (either of them) was heavy, overly molasses-y, and the worst part was the "crumble."  Given the Dutch proclivity for volumetric inclusion of lard and butter, why did the crumble employ only the smallest portion of butter and sugar to whole cups of flour?  No amount of time or dedication to working in the small amount of fat would have resulted in anything approaching "crumble" and the resulting pie topping seems to her to be nothing more than whole cups of flour dumped onto the top of the pie, which is then inhaled or sneezed into a cloud of powder.  "Crumble" of this nature did not lend anything positive to what might be an otherwise tolerable pastry accompaniment to coffee.

We can feel the hackles of Dutch ancestors rising from the grave to protest this amount of ShooFly unappreciation.

All this is to say Coffee Shoofly Cake, or Centennial Cake, could only be an improvement on Shoofly Pie in Claire's mind.  The recipe was straightforward, did not require an overnight rise or four (as several of our dishes have), and involved chocolate, so what could really go wrong?  And indeed, the cake was great - a decided contender for breakfast bread honorifics among banana bread and coffee cake.  There is also something so literal and wonderful about the inclusion of coffee in the cake batter - coffee cake could learn a thing or two from this.

A single tweak to the original recipe was made along the way, a small thing that made an enormous impact.  We doubled the fat used to make the "crumble" so that there was something to hold the flour together more than the dust of the previous Shoofly Pies.  This was a great improvement and might even be the change that if implemented elsewhere, would probably salvage Shoofly pie for Claire.  

Here is our version of the recipe for Shoofly Coffee Cake, posted in the Recipes Section.

Claire, Geoff, Martha and Geoff’s sister Pam visited the Kutztown Folk Festival on July 5-6, 2024.  Now in its 74th year, the Kutztown Festival is an extravagant display of Pennsylvania Dutch craft and food.  This being the Weiss’s second consecutive year at the Festival, they adjusted their schedule to allow attendance at the annual quilt auction on the second Saturday, July 6.  The auction is legendary.  The “Quilt Barn” on the Festival grounds is a large building with internal iron scaffolding set around the edges of the space for display of the many hundreds of quilts that are crafted and offered for sale.  The Quilt Barn is also the only airconditioned space and so has that as an additional attractant beyond the beauty of the quilts.  During the Festival, a juried competition is held for the best-in-show quilts.  It is these quilts that are offered at auction.  Beautifully designed creations showcasing the quilters’ art fetch prices in the thousands of dollars during a lively bidding process led by skilled and entertaining auctioneers.  Yet the prices hardly seem adequate compensation for the quilters’ one- to two-year effort.

Baking is a key skill of the Dutch homemaker.  Geoff’s Mom-Mom was a gifted baker, producing numerous examples of Pennsylvania Dutch baked confections, several of which have been featured in this blog already.  The extraordinary output of sweet or savory pies, breakfast breads, cookies and coffee cakes from her tiny kitchen in Mount Airy, Philadelphia, was testament to her ability.  Consequently, Geoff and Claire will offer recipes for baked goods over the next several months.  This edition will focus on a basic bread, Apple Bread, which can be enhanced by the addition of dried fruits to this lightly sweet dough.

The recipe Geoff and Claire used was taken from Dutch Treats: Heirloom Recipes from Farmhouse Kitchens.  The recipe as published was discovered in an 1856 Maryland Almanac for the Pennsylvania Dutch community.  Key ingredients for this recipe are applesauce (or apple puree) and apple “tea.”  The basic bread recipe may be enhanced by the addition of dried fruits to the apple sponge (apple sauce, yeast and flour) before the final addition of flour to the mix making it an excellent fall bread recipe.  

Read our version of the recipe for Apple Bread in the Recipes Section.

Although certainly an important component of the Pennsylvania Dutch diet, vegetables do not rank as highly as other edible competitors for the Dutch palate.  In Ruth Hutchison’s cookbook, the chapter “Vegetables” ranks sixth in page length (18 pages) behind “Bread and Breadstuffs” (39 pages), “Meats” (23 pages), “Sweets and Sours” (19 pages), “Cake” (19 pages), and “Cookies” (19 pages).  As it should be.  Many of the vegetable recipes that Hutchinson features are a tribute to the Dutch inclination toward making even the lowliest produce suitable for presentation on the dinner table. To wit: Dandelion Salad or Onion Pie.  The chapter begins with nine recipes devoted to the humble potato and another nine potato recipes distributed among other chapters.  The Dutch, it might be said, are a strongly meat-and-potato people.

Geoff and his sister Pam were often served vegetable dishes by their grandmother with the admonition that they could not leave the table until all the vegetables on their plates were consumed.  It was a safe bet that many of the vegetables served by Mom-Mom were chosen and purchased during trips “up-country” to the farmers markets of the Perkiomen and Lehigh Valleys.  The fertility of the land in Lancaster and Berkshire Counties was legendary.  Dutch farms often cultivated kitchen gardens, small fenced plots of land behind the homestead where fruits and vegetables were grown, ultimately destined for the family’s dinner table or for pickling and storage in the pantry.  For some, the kitchen garden was symbolic of the Garden of Eden and served as the source of plants with medicinal value or supernatural powers.

Behind their stone duplex home in the Mt. Airy section of Philadelphia, Mom-Mom and Pop-Pop did not have a full kitchen garden.  They did, however, maintain a tiny cottage industry of home-grown flowers, fruits and vegetables in a strip of ground around their garage and along the walk connecting the backdoor to the garage.  An old and stately apple tree was the centerpiece of their yard, producing an annual supply of fruit for pies and schnitz un knepp (roast ham, dried apples and dumplings).  Mom-Mom and Pop-Pop would also assiduously pick dandelions from their own backyard, admonishing that the best plants were those plucked just as the yellow flower bloomed. The greens were converted into a salad that had a slightly bitter flavor, much like arugula.  A warm dressing of bacon fat, crumbled bacon, vinegar, sour cream, egg yolk, flour and sugar converted the dandelion greens to a mouth-watering delicacy.  Geoff and Claire have not attempted this special treat because the dominant springtime lawn plants in their patch of Virginia seem to be clover and chickweed (the latter also a nutritious edible green which the Dutch incorporate into a pie). 

For this edition of A Pennsylvania Dutch Table, Geoff and Claire sought to produce two vegetable dishes which would serve as acceptable dinner entrees: Corn Pie and Stuffed Cabbage.  Geoff does not recall ever being served either dish by his grandmother.  However, each dish’s ingredients and preparation are sufficiently simple to beg additions and experimentation.  During their appearance on Doug Madenford’s YouTube show “PA Dutch 101,” Claire and Geoff declared their intent to prepare a corn pie for this edition.  Doug fairly swooned at the prospect of fresh corn pie, offering off-the-cuff suggestions of savory additions to the basic recipe.  

We would love to hear from our readers about their suggestions for added ingredients or recipe modifications.

Both recipes are loosely abstracted from Ruth Hutchison’s The New Pennsylvania Dutch Cookbook.

Check out our version of the recipes for corn pie and stuffed cabbage in the Recipes Section.

Mom-Mom was an avid fisherwoman.  When visiting the family’s summer home in the Poconos on Lake Wallenpaupack, Mom-Mom could spend the better part of a day with a rod and spinning reel, sitting on the boat dock and dipping a line into the lake with a bobber and a worm, grasshopper or cheese on the hook.  No one can recall ever seeing her catch a fish, so the point, it seems, was to enjoy an opportunity for repose and meditation.  In fact, no one was sure that Mom-Mom had any idea what to do if she actually hooked a fish.  Pop-Pop, on the other hand, was at these times usually observed sitting in a lawn chair on the porch, dressed in a white linen shirt and necktie, admiring the view and sipping a Manhattan.  He was never observed to wield a fishing rod, perhaps taking the opportunity for repose and meditation in his own way.

Geoff and his sister Pam do not recall fish being a prominent part of their Pennsylvania Dutch grandmother’s culinary repertoire.  Although Mom-Mom and Pop-Pop enjoyed seafood of all types, fish or crustaceans rarely appeared on the table (except for scalloped oysters).  This reality may also have been related in part to the grandkids’ dislike of having to negotiate the removal of bones before a fish could be consumed, a non-starter for Geoff and Pam.

Lack of fish fare notwithstanding, Geoff and Claire thought this month’s recipe should be devoted to preparing a fish entree.  Upon a perusal of their Dutch cookbook collection, the paucity of fish dishes was striking.  Ruth Hutchison’s volume, The New Pennsylvania Dutch Cookbook, offered a baked shad recipe with simple instructions for preparation.  Shad was clearly the favored species of the Dutch, with main dishes often accompanied by fried shad roe.  Looking for shad around Charlottesville with a view to acquirijng a whole gutted fish, Geoff and Claire found none easiy at hand.  It seems that a moratorium has been placed on shad acquisition in Virginia, requiring anglers to catch and release only since 2019.  Truth be told, we had not really envisioned catching our own fish to cook, but it seems commercially available shad is proscribed as well.  

Despite shad being termed a “founding fish” in American culinary history, shad populations are and have been in a downward spiral from habitat loss, pollution, and over fishing, to the point that “East Coast states will be required to ban all comercial and recreational American shad fishing in state waters.”   Instead of shad, we purchased the NOAA-approved, sustainably managed striped bass.  The fish we purchased had been fileted, making preparationm easy and consumption easier than the notoriously boney shad would have been.  Two filets provided about two pounds of fish (skin on).  The fish was cooked in a slow oven at 275 degrees F.  Fortunately for us, the resulting dish was a success--mouthwatering aroma, outstanding flavor--an excellent baked/steamed fish.  Indeed, one could use a variety of different freshwater and saltwater fish for this recipe with expectation of good results.

As an accompaniment, Geoff and Claire chose an onion pie, also in Hutchison’s book.  This recipe was sufficiently simple to allow embellishment of the pie with other condiments and foods to enhance its savor.  The onion pie was very much like a quiche after adding some additional ingredients to the basic recipe.  Sauteed garlic was added to the onions.  Because of Geoff’s red meat allergy, turkey bacon was exchanged for the pork bacon in the original recipe, an addition which produced a sweeter flavor than bacon.  A topping of chopped Swiss cheese at the end of the bake lent a lovely texture and rich flavor to the mild onion and garlic mix.  The firm crust and the custard-like filling were a worthy accompaniment to the fish.  Ruth Hutchison compared the onion pie to Quiche Lorraine, observing that a Pennsylvania Dutch onion pie may be served as an appetizer.  Steamed fresh broccoli rounded out the meal.  

Check out the recipes for the baked fish and the onion pie in the Recipes Section.

For the Pennsylvania Dutch, baked confections are hallmarks of the Christian holidays.  No strangers to feasting at any time of the year, during the Christmas holiday, the Dutch surrendered to “schmausing” or celebration and consumption with wanton abandon after weeks of food preparation.  Among the abundant victuals of the Dutch table were sweets including fruits, pies, cakes, sweetbreads…and [drum roll, please…] cookies.  Indeed, within the cookbooks we consult for this blog, whole chapters are devoted to cookie recipes.

Christmas is the apex of the year’s holidays and is especially abundant with cookies (kuchen), although these bite-sized morsels are legal tender at any time of year.  Among the various religious sects of the Pennsylvania Dutch, the Moravian Christmas in the Lehigh Valley cities of Bethlehem, Nazareth and Lititz is arguably the most elaborate.  Count Zinzendorf, a nobleman from the Duchy of Saxony, Germany, was leader of the Moravians when he and his followers were banished from Saxony for their radical religious views (as far as we know, cookies had nothing to do with that banishment).  They settled in northeast Pennsylvania near the confluence of the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers, a place Zinzendorf felt resembled Christ's birthplace, whereupon he named the settlement Bethlehem in 1741.  

As mentioned last year, Geoff’s grandmother Katie always replenished a tin with fresh cookies whenever the Weiss kids visited.  Her specialties were pinwheel cookies and chocolate chip cookies, atypical for the Dutch pantry but always prepared to perfect crispness and rich sweetness.  Her cookies were available in abundance during the Christmas holiday.  It’s a miracle that Geoff and sister Pam still had a sound tooth remaining in their heads.

Taking their Dutch heritage to heart, Geoff and Claire made holiday cookies in preparation for a recent Weiss open house.  The cookies chosen for the open house and for this blog episode were almond cookies from Hutchison's The New Pennsylvania Dutch Cookbook, and Meisli (mice) from Weaver's Pennsylvania Dutch Country Cooking. The cookies were served, discussions about the blog ensued, an informal preference poll was taken among the guests who sampled the cookies, and visions of sugar plumbs danced in everyone’s heads.   

Preparation of the almond cookies was straightforward and produced a crisp shortbread which was cut into various shapes (we went for stars, snow flakes, tiny airplanes, tiny trees, tiny bears, and dog bones), then topped with icing and sliced/chopped almonds.  

The recipe for Meisli was chosen for the visual appeal; anything that includes the application of little ears and eyes as part of the recipe is a sho0-in choice (to be clear, decorative ears and eyes; though the Dutch are fond of their organ meats and meaty appendages, no such elements are found in these cookies).  Although the Meisli were high on the cute scale, the flavor and texture were disappointing to us.  The mice crumbled after baking, making it difficult to apply the ears and eyes: the cookies were powdery and dry, and they weren’t all that sweet.  We think the dough required an added binder (perhaps an egg) and/or more sugar to create a more cohesive cookie.  To enhance the sweetness of the Meisli, we used leftover icing from the almond cookies to bring them up to cookie par and to help hold the mice together (there’s nothing worse than a self-destructing mouse).  The application of currants for eyes and almond slices for ears was improved by the adhesiveness of the icing.

At the open house, to Geoff and Claire’s surprise, the majority of the taste testers (guests) liked the Meisli.  A few commented that the cookie was indeed dry and would have accompanied a cup of coffee very well.  For some, the diminished sweetness was an asset for the adult palate.  Several guests took a few cookies home with them because they looked cute and they wanted another taste.  Perhaps a longer colling period or a week’s refrigeration of the cookie would exert a positive effect upon the texture.  The almond cookies were judged average to above average, a fine appraisal for a fairly ordinary sugar cookie that can serve as a canvas for the application of icings, nuts and other adornments.

Check out the recipes for both cookies in the Recipes Section.

Geoff and sister Pam don’t specifically recall their grandparents’ taste for seafood, but several pieces of circumstantial evidence suggest that Mom-Mom and Pop-Pop partook of the ocean’s bounty.  Pam, Geoff, and their parents Leah and Francis would spend an annual summer vacation in Ocean City, NJ, renting the first floor of a house on West Avenue.  The house backed up against the marshes of Great Egg Harbor Bay and they would often welcome visits from family and friends for a brief taste of life at the seashore.  Among the visitors, Mom-Mom and Pop-Pop would make the two-hour trip from Philly and spend a weekend.  The family would bring in a supply of cherrystone clams or Maryland crabs and steam up a batch for a glorious meal, leaving a happy mess in the kitchen and dining room, and exultant expressions of satisfaction from the adults.

The grandparents were not great beachgoers.  Neither Pam nor Geoff could remember Mom-Mom or Pop-Pop in a bathing suit or swimming trunks.  Mom-Mom was satisfied to remain back at the house knitting or crocheting while Pop-Pop would sit on a webbed beach chair on the porch smoking a cigar and reading the Wall Street Journal.  Pop-Pop was once observed on the edge of the beach attired in wool trousers, white dress shirt, bowtie and a vest.  No surf or sand would ruffle him, the picture of untanned propriety.

Nevertheless, shellfish were yet a favorite component of Mom-Mom and Pop-Pop's diet.  One of the traditional seafood dishes prepared by Mom-Mom and enjoyed at a Christmas or Thanksgiving meal was scalloped oysters.  Indeed, the Pennsylvania Dutch were connoisseurs of the oyster, as demonstrated by recipes for oyster stew, oyster pie, fried oysters, oyster stuffing, oyster omelets, oyster-ham rafts, veal and oyster gumbis (an oyster, meat and cabbage casserole) and fried oyster Ountelaunee (oysters in fried cornmeal mush pockets).  Even the Weiss kids learned to savor this delicacy, a concoction of fresh shucked oysters, saltine cracker crumbs, cream and butter served as a baked casserole.  It seems to have also been a taste that was inherited by the next generation forward.  Claire recalls that in third or fourth grade, during a Social Studies exercise that necessitated writing down her favorite food, she wrote “raw oysters on the half-shell,” which was met with skepticism and (by some in her class) revulsion.  With Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays approaching, it seemed fitting that Claire and Geoff prepare an oyster dish as was and sometimes still is the custom of the Weiss family.

We examined several oyster recipes and found the one featured here in Heller’s Dutch Cookbook, sourced from the recipes of Mrs. Richard Thomas of Exton, Pa, to be the nearest in approximation to the scalloped oysters of our memory.

This recipe produced a very tasty and filling oyster pie, sufficient to serve at least six people.  All the liquid had been absorbed by the crackers leaving a very moist interior.  We felt, however, that there remained room for improvement of this recipe.  

First, a pint of oysters for a pie of this size seemed meager.  Several mouthfuls of a pie serving contained no oyster meat – a travesty!  A quart of oysters would likely have better served this dish.  At the time of this writing, the going rate for a pint of oysters was $20.00.  A quart of oysters would double that cost.  Consequently, the cost of building this pie as an entrée relegates it to special events or holidays.

Second, most of the pie filling was cracker crumbs moistened by cream, butter and oyster liquor.  It seemed to us that the filling was not savory enough.  A survey of several other oyster pie recipes suggested a layer of chopped hard boiled eggs.  One recipe added a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce to the filling.  We also thought the flavor of a future pie would be boosted by a layer of chopped, cooked or sauteed onions.  Fillings consisting of cracker crumbs made with various spices and flavors are worth experimentation.

Check out the recipe for Oyster Pie in the Recipes Section.

Geoff and Claire’s brief sojourn at the Festival was such a congenial experience that they pledged to return next year.  Among the targets will be the quilt auction and a meal at the Country Kitchen.  G&C wish to convey their gratitude to all of the interviewees who were so generous with their time, and to Heather Zimmerman, Festival Director, who made this special project possible.    

Inspired by Joyce’s Dinosaur Stew (well, potpie), but having made potpie recently for the blog, Geoff and Claire pivoted to Chicken Corn Soup as our thematic meal. They were also keen to make a savory entrée and side dish for this month’s chapter since the last three blog entries were baked or fried sweet confections.  G&C confess that chicken dishes have taken center stage of late because Geoff has acquired Alpha-Gal Allergy (red meat allergy), making many Pennsylvania Dutch dishes--which tend to be heavy on the pork and beef end of the spectrum--out of reach.  The soup recipe was modified from Ruth Hutchison’s The New Pennsylvania Dutch Cookbook. As before with our chicken potpie recipe – sorry, Dinosaur Stew – we used a precooked rotisserie chicken from Costco.  The more ambitious among you may opt to stew a whole bird to make your own stock for this recipe.  Otherwise, the soup was prepared as written in the cookbook. G&C were very happy with the result.  It is simple, especially with the amendment of a pre-cooked chicken.  The most complex part was the preparation of the noodles, which could also be swapped for store-bought egg noodles.  Fresh-made noodles, however, were a nice component of the soup, providing a firm, chewy texture.

To accompany the soup, G&C paired it with Pottsville Pickle, a sweet relish side.  The Pickle is the first recipe Geoff and Claire have drawn from William Woys Weaver’s cookbook, Pennsylvania Dutch Country Cooking, which they saw for sale in Dietrich’s Meats and Country Store after departing the Kutztown Festival.  Mr. Weaver reports that this recipe came from the late Ora Yoder, a resident of Schuylkill County who canned this pickle in the fall for 50 years.  The pickle is a sweet-sour relish with a light crunch and a wonderful aroma.  Tomatillos replaced green tomatoes because green tomatoes were difficult to find this late in the season.  The pickle eaten alone was a very tasty side for the soup entrée.  The next day, the relish made an excellent topping for grilled cheeseburgers.  

Read the recipe for Chicken Corn Soup and the accompanying Pottsville Pickle recipe.

This month’s recipe - Funnel Cake – is a nod to the Virginville Grange and an attempt to continue the fun of the Festival at home.  Searching through our small Pennsylvania Dutch cookbook collection, funnel cake recipes are common to all and vary little in their basic ingredients and technique.  However, recipes differ in the proportions of those ingredients and the yield of funnel cakes, ranging from about 2 dozen to 8 dozen cakes, varying in size from 3 inches to 12 inches in diameter.  We chose the recipe offered in Edna Eby Heller’s Dutch Cookbook Revised, principally for its more modest yield.  We modified the recipe by adding vanilla extract.  Heller’s recipe recommends the use of a funnel with at least a 5/8” opening.  Our funnel had a 3/8” opening and worked just fine.  Ms. Heller also asserts that “fat cakes and molasses are well nigh inseparable.  Always serve funnel cakes with molasses.”  However, we waived the molasses in favor of drizzled honey and/or confectioner’s sugar and cinnamon.  Indeed, as we sat together munching, we could think of many other possible garnishments: fruit jams and jellies, ground cardamom, vanilla ice cream, apple strudel filling, chocolate sauce, etc., etc.  Toppings for funnel cake are only limited by the imagination.

Check out the recipe for funnel cake in the Recipes Section.

Come back next month when Geoff and Claire will offer another recipe and relate the stories of more of the fine people at the Kutztown Folk Festival.

The lowly pretzel is a time-honored snack for our family.  On childhood visits to their grandparents’ home in the Mount Airy section of Philadelphia, Geoff and his sister Pam would be escorted to the basement for an after dinner treat.  In a pantry cupboard under the basement steps, amidst all the other pantry items, nestled a large tin can.  When the can was opened by their grandmother, the kids were allowed one large handful of pretzels.  These were the dark brown, thin, crunchy pretzel variety.  The kids took them upstairs to be eaten outside the house.  It is an early memory for Geoff and Pam who recall their grandparents’ home as a repository of all sorts of sweet and savory delights.

At home in New Jersey, Geoff and Pam had access to a heavily worn, bright yellow and red “pretzel can” from The Bachman Company, always filled with thin, hard-baked pretzels and freely accessed when a snack was needed.  Francis, Geoff’s father, was equally a connoisseur of the crispy treats.  Woe to the individual who returned from grocery shopping without a fresh supply of pretzels.  They were often crushed and sprinkled over ice cream with chocolate sauce, conferring a delightful crunchy texture and salty flavor to the dessert.  Pretzels always tasted great with a bottle of Coke, Hawaiian Punch, lemonade, chocolate milk, or sweet iced tea.  Pam recalls sampling soft pretzels from the Reading Terminal Market in Philly, usually sold as a raft of three pretzels slathered with plenty of yellow mustard

Bachman pretzels were reliably found in the grocery stores of South Jersey and the Philadelphia metropolitan area.  The Bachman Company was founded in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1884.  In 2012, Utz Quality Foods acquired The Bachman Company and one of its manufacturing plants.  It is perhaps not surprising that Geoff now finds Utz pretzels to be his favorite.  Numerous manufacturers continue to produce pretzels in or about the “pretzel belt” of southeastern Pennsylvania, an area contiguous with the Dutch country.  

Of course, there are many varieties of pretzels: large soft pretzels, thin or thick hard-baked pretzels, pretzel sticks and rods, pretzel nuggets flavored with a variety of spices or flavors, as well as more recently created varieties, such as peanut butter-stuffed pretzel nuggets, chocolate-covered pretzels, etc.  Even the Girl Scouts endorse Chocolate Thin Mints Pretzels.  

The story of the origin of pretzels is apocryphal. Records from the early Christian era to the Middle Ages cite Italian, French or German ancestry.  There are strong religious connections with claims of the invention of pretzels by monks as rewards for pious children.  Legend has it that pretzels represent angels with their arms crossed in prayer. Pretzel images may be found in religious art and stained-glass windows.  Pretzels are now a secular treat, consumed in vast quantities across the United States and Europe.

We chose to attempt a pretzel bake with this edition of the Pennsylvania Dutch Table because Geoff is addicted to pretzels and because the pretzel has been appropriated as the Weiss coat-of-arms. We chose to use the pretzel recipe published in The New Pennsylvania Dutch Cookbook by Ruth Hutchison.  It is surprising that no other cookbooks in our small collection offered a pretzel recipe, yet recipes incorporating pretzels (e.g., pretzel soup) are found in several of them.

Our first baking experience with this recipe was OK - satisfactory but not superb.  The final product was a lightly browned pretzel ranging in texture from chewy soft to crispy hard, based largely on the pre-bake thickness of the dough (there was quite a range of size and thickness represented).  The taste of the pretzels was excellent but lacked the classic metallic flavor of commercial pretzels.  

We feel our path went wrong at the hot water bath stage.

After making the dough and forming the knot, the recipe called for the pretzels to be parboiled, but provided no guidance about the length of time the pretzels should remain in the water bath. Also, it did not specify using an alkaline agent in the water.  We left some pretzels in the bath for about five minutes, and they became decidedly soggy, beginning to disintegrate.  The later batches of pretzels were dropped into the hot water for 1-2 minutes per side.  Recalling a recent article “The Best Pretzels You’ll Ever Have” in Cook’s Illustrated Magazine (America’s Test Kitchen, Boston, September-October, 2022), we examined its recipe for tips about pretzel creation.  Considerable content was devoted to dipping the pretzels in a bath of lye solution, a German technique for investing the final baked product with a shiny, dark brown surface and mineral flavor.  The necessity of (essentially) a HazMat suit to carry out the lye dip safely was a non-starter for us.  The article offered an alternative, however, using a solution of baking soda as the alkaline agent (1/2 cup per 8 cups water), heated to near boiling, which had the added advantage of requiring no special protective apparel.  In this version, the pretzels were dipped for 30 seconds on each side.  In addition, this recipe called for baking at 475 degrees F.  

In hindsight, our pre-baking research and technical preparation for this recipe could have been better.  Although the product was tasty, we do not feel we cleared the bar for a classic pretzel.  Next time, we will definitely incorporate the alkaline water bath.

And here is the recipe for  pretzels as we made them.

Fastnachts, leavened German donuts, are named for the day on which they are traditionally made and eaten: Fastnacht, or Shrove Tuesday.  Fastnacht literally means Fast Night in German, foreshadowing the coming austerity of Lent beginning that evening.  As J. George Frederick observed in his collection of Pennsylvania Dutch folklore, "[Fastnacht] once included a fasting period at some obscure ancient time, but the Dutch never fast!"*   Even though the day of Fastnacht is past this year (February 22), Geoff and Claire thought preparation of a batch of fastnachts would be appropriate for the Easter season. Full disclosure: Geoff did not recall his grandparents ever making fastnachts.  

Easter is a major holiday of the Dutch calendar, having the essential elements of any worthy German religious holiday: church, food, and fun.  Legend has it that the Easter egg and the Easter rabbit are derived from Teutonic mythology, the product of the pagan beliefs of the Germans that underwent a rebranding when Christianity was introduced into northern Europe.**   The connection was absorbed into Christian tradition and came with the early German immigrants to the New World.

Geoff’s grandparents, James and Katie, often visited during the holiday.  Everyone dressed in their Sunday finest: the men and boys in full suits with linen shirts, neckties and polished shoes; the women and girls in elegant and frilly spring outfits with fine hats.  Geoff and his sister Pam were obliged to suffer close inspection and the critical commentary of their grandparents before departing for the drive to church.  The kids would return home to Easter baskets filled with jellybeans, chocolate eggs and rabbits, marshmallow Peeps, dyed hard-boiled eggs, and favorite candy bars.  The day was capped by a grand Sunday dinner, always including an Easter roast ham, the only meat that Grandfather James would tolerate. 

Churchgoing was not reserved for major holidays, however.  If Geoff and Pam were spending a weekend in Philadelphia with their grandparents, a Sunday drive to attend the "upcountry" service at the New Goshenhoppen church in East Greenville, Pennsylvania, was a certainty.  Records posted on the church’s website date the formation of this German Reformed congregation on October 17, 1727 with celebration of the first communion.  The present church building dates to 1857.  It is a beautiful and stately edifice, constructed in brick with large windows on all sides, a large and graceful steeple adorning the front peak of the roof.  The interior is elegant in its simplicity, the main floor filled with wooden pews, a balcony on three sides with a pipe organ at the rear, and a simple altar above the chancel.  At their deaths, both James and Katie were buried in the New Goshenhoppen cemetery.  

Geoff and Pam would sit beside their grandparents during the "New Gosh" church service.  The kids were provided with coloring books, puzzle books, anything to keep them from becoming squirmy or noisy during the service.  The church service itself seemed interminable as the children sat through endless hymns, recitation of the creeds and a sermon completely devoid of pictures or cartoons.  By the end of the service, Geoff and Pam felt freed from the oversight of their family, realizing that finding food was the next task of the day.

Geoff and Claire aim to remedy the absence of fastnachts from the Weiss family repertoire.  They scoured their small Dutch cookbook library to identify an authentic fastnacht recipe.  Several features of the reviewed recipes seemed essential to the doughnut tradition: 

1. Mashed potatoes are incorporated into the batter. 

2. The initial batter proofing is an overnight affair, the flour, potatoes and yeast being combined after dinner, the eggs, sugar and milk added either at bedtime or the next morning. 

3. The shape of the fastnacht is quadrilateral or triangular, with a slit made in the middle.  "True" fastnachts are never round nor have a central hole, a mortal sin committed by some cookbook authors and YouTube producers.  But who are we to judge?

The recipe that Geoff and Claire chose was one published in Frederick’s Pennsylvania Dutch Cookery.  They made this choice because the ingredients promised a batch of smaller size (3-4 dozen) than several other recipes yielding 7-8 dozen doughnuts.  As fate would have it, our attempt to limit the doughnut yield backfired spectacularly.  The initial batter preparation for overnight proof seemed straightforward.  The following morning, a substantial rise had taken place, and active bubbling could be seen on the surface of the batter, but it was a very liquid mix.  After adding the eggs, butter and sugar, the batter became even more soupy than doughy, nowhere near the consistency that would have allowed kneading, much less rolling or cutting.  In hindsight, this was a consequence of the volume of liquid (potato water and milk) added at the outset, reflecting our unfamiliarity with how much liquid is normally applied to the "scalding" of flour.  The addition of six more cups of flour (10 total for this recipe) and one-half cup of additional sugar brought the dough together enough that it finally held its shape and could be lifted from the bowl for rolling.  Having much more dough than initially expected, they split it in half, placed it into separate bowls (none of our bowls was large enough for the single doughy mass even before proofing) and left each half to rise for another hour.  After rising, three quarters of the dough was rolled to thickness and cut into separate fastnachts.  The frying step was easy and produced puffy brown doughnuts.  We used avocado oil for frying because of its high smoke point.  The remaining quarter of the batter became a loaf that we placed into a conventional greased baking pan (8" x 4" x 4") baked in a hot oven (400 deg. F) for 25 minutes.

The recipe yielded 7 dozen fastnachts, and a lovely “Dutch Cake” loaf.  Much more food than we bargained for.

And here is the recipe for fastnachts that we made.

* Pennsylvania Dutch Cookery (The Business Bourse, 1935), 346.

** Frederic Klees, The Pennsylvania Dutch (The Macmillan Company, New York, 1952), 41. 

Chickens were plentiful on the Pennsylvania Dutch farm, and cooked chicken was always a staple of the Pennsylvania Dutch menu at any time, but particularly during the holidays.  As Ruth Hutchison observes in The New Pennsylvania Dutch Cookbook, the belief that cows talked on Christmas Eve presented a certain moral dilemma for the Dutch family feasting on beef.  No such issues accompanied the chicken, the fowl possessing no special skills or talents.  Consequently, chicken was prepared fried, baked, stewed, with waffles or dumplings, or in a pot pie, especially around the holidays. 

In the mid-18th century, Johannes Weiss sailed from the German Rhineland with his wife, Catharina, and settled in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, establishing the line that would produce the father-daughter team authoring this blog.  Johannes and Catharina spawned ten offspring, planting deep family roots in the area.  The family remained pillars of the Lehigh Valley Dutch community for four generations until James, Geoff’s grandfather and Claire’s great grandfather, moved south to Philadelphia.  Despite having moved to Philly, James and his wife, Katie, always regarded the Lehigh Valley "up-country" as the center of the Dutch universe and made every effort to remain connected with the extended family and their church. 

James and Katie would often travel to East Greenville to attend Sunday church services at the New Goshenhoppen Church, a Reformed congregation.  After church, they would also find a favorite Dutch farm where they would purchase chicken comestibles: a couple dozen eggs and a live chicken.  The chicken would get locked in the trunk of the car while the eggs got to ride up front for the trip home.  Once everyone was back home in Philadelphia, it was the fate of that chicken that lives large in the family lore.

Geoff and his sister Pam recall spending a weekend with their grandparents, joining them for the drive to East Greenville, the church service, the visit to the farm for the eggs and a chicken, and the drive home.  It was a day out for the family which left the kids unprepared for what came next.  After arriving home, James faced the challenge of cornering and capturing the chicken from the trunk of his Packard.  The process involved a lot of swearing as the chicken successfully evaded capture for a while.  Eventually James succeeded in seizing the chicken and pulling it from the car, holding the bird upside down by the legs.  For young kids whose usual source of chicken was a grocery store, what came next seemed to them a particularly barbaric, bloody, and frightening process.  James unceremoniously wringed the chicken’s neck, then, just to be doubly sure, cut its head off with an axe.  Once beheaded, the chicken was drained of blood and dunked head(less) first into a large can of steaming water in order to loosen the feathers.  The next half hour or so was devoted to everyone plucking feathers, all seated in a circle around the hapless chicken.  Finally, James gutted the bird and handed it over to Katie who washed and prepared it for the stew pot.  

It was a major accomplishment for the kids to overcome their revulsion at the process and actually eat the resulting meal, having witnessed the carnage that led up to it.  It was a testimony to Katie’s cooking art that their revulsion was short-lived. 

Geoff and Claire thought it was time to prepare a main course and a side dish for this month’s chapter.  A chicken pot pie and Dutch slaw were chosen.

The recipe for chicken pot pie was abstracted from Hutchison’s The New Pennsylvania Dutch Cookbook.  Although calling for the stewing of two young chickens, Claire and Geoff elected to purchase one rotisserie chicken, ubiquitously and cheaply available from most chain groceries and warehouse markets.  This maneuver obviously saved much time and effort and worked supremely well.  No live chickens’ necks had to be wrung by the cooks in the process.

The biscuit dough for the crust and topping of the pot pie was started as written, but modified during the course of mixing.  The amount of milk and butter was doubled to have the dough hold together.   Increasing the volume of dough was advisable since the recipe produced just enough and, even then, only barely; rolling and spreading the dough to its maximum left a few holes.  Consideration was given to using a flour mix like Bisquick (which likely could have served equally well) but we prevailed with Hutchison’s recipe in the name of authenticity.

The outcome of this project was excellent.  The crust was crispy, slightly chewy and flavorful, all the way to the bottom.  The contents of the pie contained a few ounces of liquid.  There was an abundance of chicken and vegetables.  It was a savory meal and went very well with the Dutch Slaw.  There was sufficient pie for six servings.

The base recipe for the Dutch slaw came from Davidow and Goodman’s Pennsylvania Dutch Peoples Cookbook.  The resulting dish was a lovely deep purple slaw laced with the orange of the carrots.  There was sufficient slaw for six servings.  More or less sugar may be added, tablespoon by tablespoon, depending upon whether a tart or a sweet slaw is desired.  For future renditions of this slaw, fruit could easily be added (perhaps ½ cup chopped apple, raisins or chopped dried apricot).  The slaw may be served either hot or cold.

And here is our recipe for chicken pot pie and the recipe for Dutch slaw.

Grandparents James and Katie were the epitome of Pennsylvania Dutch comportment: a strait-laced social demeanor, a sense of humor dry as a piece of toast, and an intolerance for the shenanigans of youth.  Geoff and his sister Pam quickly learned that a consequences of their exercise of good behavior were considerable rewards bestowed upon them by their grandparents.  Those rewards were often food and the cookie was the coin of the realm.

As we’ve observed earlier, Katie was a practitioner of the art de cuisine when it came to Dutch food.  Yet her cookie repertoire was fairly commonplace.  Chocolate chip cookies, pinwheel cookies and decorated Christmas sugar cookies were the most common varieties offered to Geoff and Pam.  Usually, these baked baubles were handed out as the well behaved Weiss kids departed after an evening’s visit to their grandparents’ home, one of the best expressions of Katie’s love of family.  All of the cookies tended to be on the crispy side.  For example, the chocolate chip cookies (which we called toll house cookies) assumed a crunchy mound-like quality, chock full of semi-sweet chocolate morsels, different from the usual flat, soft variety found in the cake-and-cookie trade.

For this Holiday Edition of the blog, we wished to pay tribute to those halcyon cookie days and so made two types of cookies.  

First, we sought a recipe for pinwheel cookies as a testimonial to one of Katie’s benchmark baked goods.  It is noteworthy that none of our Dutch cookbooks contained a recipe for pinwheel cookies.  Discerning the origins of the pinwheel cookie is a futile endeavor, in part because the definition of the pinwheel cookie varies from one source to another.  Recipes may be found for a filled cookie roll: a white dough rolled over a date and nut filling.  Other variations include fruit fillings or multi-hued doughs with all manner of flavorings.  The classic recipe that we sought involved a white vanilla dough and a dark chocolate dough rolled together.  We chose a pinwheel cookie recipe published by Bunsen Burner Bakery because of its simplicity.  One should plan on about 4-5 hours prep time, although most of the time is consumed by 3.5 hours of refrigerator/freezer chill of the dough.

The recipe produces four logs of rolled cookie dough; we baked two which yielded about 32 cookies.  The remaining two logs remain in the freezer for another day.  Our experience produced a beautiful cookie and pleasantly sweet, quite firm and crispy, holding a sharp edge after cutting and baking.  It was our impression that the dough seemed slightly dry and a little crumbly after preparation.  Perhaps the dough deserved the addition of a few tablespoons of water to soften it up and make it more pliable.  The firmness and crispiness may also have been a consequence of overbaking because the sought-after golden change to the cookie was difficult to discern.  Nevertheless, the preparation of this cookie was decidedly fun and challenging. 

For the second classic Pennsylvania Dutch cookie recipe (to sample a more traditional variety), we elected to try lebkuchen.  The origin of the term is obscure, leb- perhaps derived from the German leib- or loaf, kuchen meaning cake.  Most sources attribute the origin of the cookie to 13th century Bavarian monks.  A recipe that old has certainly undergone considerable modification.  In our small collection of cookbooks, the lebkuchen recipes show noteworthy variations: sweetness provided by molasses or honey, brown sugar or granulated sugar; anise seed or no anise seed; varying spice and flavoring mixtures drawn from cocoa powder, cinnamon, cloves, allspice, cardamom, nutmeg, coffee, brandy, grated lemon and orange rind.  All lebkuchen incorporate chopped nuts and citron (a large, thick-skinned lemon-like citrus).

We used Ruth Hutchison’s recipe from The New Pennsylvania Dutch Cookbook, but halved-ingredients for recipes from our various sources were written as if serving the needs of the extended Dutch family (perhaps 50 people).   Nevertheless, half the recipe yielded about 48 lebkuchen squares.  The finished product was a nice surprise.  It had the texture of a soft cake, almost a mini-fruit cake or dense brownie.  The squares conveyed a mild sweetness with overtones of cloves, cinnamon and molasses.  Some of our family liked the product a lot, some were more guarded in their judgment.  It was agreed the lebkuchen would be an excellent accompaniment to a cup of coffee.  We have an abundance of lebkuchen now which is gradually diminishing.  It is not a confection that one is likely to consume with wild abandon (as one might approach Girl Scout Thin Mints or pinwheel cookies).  We feel the lebkuchen appeals to a more “moderate” palate, to be taken with coffee after a meal, for example.  Try it!  It’s different.

The cookie inventory in the Dutch pantry is huge.  We hope to provide examples of other cookie varieties, or variations on those tried here, in future editions of this blog.  

In the meantime, here are the recipes for Pinwheel cookies and Lebkuchen.    

The Pennsylvania Moravians are a sect of the Pennsylvania Dutch “church people” who date their origin from the sixteenth century in the eastern Czech Republic, then part of the Holy Roman Empire.  In more recent years, a large German Moravian minority spread through Prussia.  It was these individuals who emigrated from Europe to North America as Moravian missionaries during the mid-eighteenth century.  Although Moravian settlements were begun in Georgia and New York, it was the Pennsylvania Moravians who were most successful, perhaps due to the colony’s charter, which championed religious freedom.  Bethlehem, Nazareth, Emmaus, and Lititz, Pennsylvania, became strongholds of the Moravian religion and folkways.

Our neighbor, Diane, was raised in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.  A decidedly non-Moravian Scot, Diane acquired a deep appreciation of Moravian traditions.  She lived in Bethlehem until departing the city for college, and even then, during college breaks and holidays, she returned home and worked in a bakery that made and sold Moravian Sugar Cake.  This confection, a yeasted coffee cake, is a favorite sweet of the Christmas and Easter seasons.  Diane urged us to make the cake and report our experience in this blog.

The Moravian Christmas in Bethlehem is filled with wonderful traditions.  Families create seasonal Putzes or Christmas Cribs in their homes.  An entire room in the house might be devoted to holiday decorations using woodland evergreens and mosses, carved nativity scenes, special festive lights, and multi-pointed Moravian stars.  Neighbors would often go “putzing” from home to home, viewing the Christmas displays, eating sugar cake and sugar cookies, sharing stories and praise for the grand displays.  Church congregations celebrate the “Lovefeast,” a church service lit by candles and filled with the singing of hymns, often accompanied by trombone playing, and the sharing of drinks, cookies, and buns.  The traditions of the Moravian Christmas season are described in an endearing children’s story, Snow Over Bethlehem, by Katherine Milhous [Annie S. Kemerer Museum, 1975] (lent to us by Diane).

At the threshold of the Thanksgiving-Christmas holiday season, we thought it appropriate to prepare the Moravian Sugar Cake and offer its recipe, lightly curated by us.  The recipe for Moravian Sugar Cake can easily be found on the internet.  Among our small collection of Dutch cookbooks, the recipe published in The New Pennsylvania Dutch Cookbook seemed the easiest to prepare.  Other recipes required nearly 12 hours of preparation or massive quantities of butter, sugar and flour.  The unique feature of the recipe we followed is the addition of mashed potatoes to the mix.  Apparently, potatoes have been used to enrich the yeast rise.  There are two rises necessary for the cake.  The finished product has the appearance of a focaccia bread although the sugar cake is decidedly sweeter.

The product of our bake was a complete success.  It smelled wonderful in the oven, and the finished cake was pleasing to the eye.  As the cake is cut, little divots of melted butter and brown sugar are visible penetrating the crumb.  The flavor is fabulous - a not overly sweet cake, which is an excellent accompaniment to coffee or tea.  We would do nothing to change this recipe, and we agreed unanimously that it is a keeper for future preparation.      

Here is the recipe for Moravian Sugar Cake as we made it.

Pepperpot (Soup)

9 September 2022

The Pennsylvania Dutch have always been big on organ meats in their diet.  The incorporation of animal organs into various delicacies was generally a product of the Dutch inclination for thrift and frugality.  At butchering time, every component of the slaughtered livestock was harvested for food and retained for use, either as whole cuts or for grinding up (as we’ve already seen with scrapple). 

Although Dutch agricultural life was never part of his upbringing, Francis (Geoff’s father and Claire’s grandfather), was the scion of “up-country” Dutch parents and therefore had acquired a taste for the traditional foods of his parents’ heritage.  He was raised in Philadelphia but always retained a soft Dutch intonation in his voice when in the presence of Katie and James.  He was raised eating such delicacies as calves’ liver, sweetbreads, beef heart, and calves’ brains.  His taste for dishes made of the now less commonly cooked parts of animals may also have had something to do with the fact that he was a practicing general surgeon.  When he married Leah, a woman born and raised in the categorically “non-Dutch” hard-coal region of northeastern Pennsylvania, she assumed the mantle of the dutiful 1950s housewife and did her best to prepare the cuisine favored by her husband.  As kids, Geoff and his sister Pam recall being served slices of fried liver cooked to a consistency suitable only for conversion into a Coach men’s briefcase.  Pam and Geoff’s mother also served fried calves’ brains which they savored like an omelet of spoiled eggs.  One summer, years ago, when Geoff and his wife Martha were visiting Geoff’s parents in Bozeman, MT, Martha answered a knock at the door.  She was confronted by a gentleman in a flannel shirt and jeans holding an object in a plastic bag wrapped in newspaper.  He said, “We just butchered a steer, and your Dad said he’d like to have the heart.”  There in the plastic bag was a bloodied mass the size of a soccer ball, which Martha warily accepted. ‘Nuff said.  

We agreed to tackle the preparation of Philadelphia Pepperpot Soup, a quintessential Dutch recipe.  One of its central constituents is beef tripe (stomach).  Tripe is used widely as a basic ingredient in the foods of many cultures (Caribbean, Latin American, Chinese, Southeast Asian, Southern Italian, to name just a few).  Pepperpot Soup had acquired such a solid reputation as a staple of Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine that the Campbell Soup Company sold it in the Philadelphia area from 1899 to 2010.  A can of the condensed soup contained real beef tripe, vegetables and tiny, round noodles.

Finding tripe was not as straightforward as simply going to our regular grocery stores.  Inquiries at a local butcher’s business and at the meat counter at a local chain grocery store came up empty.  Claire, querying the fount of all information (Google), found that a Latin American grocery in town carried the item.  After some handwaving while uttering the word menudo, Geoff was directed to the meat counter where piles of tripe sat in a refrigerated case.  He bought two pounds.

Also needed was one veal knuckle.  Butcher shops contacted in Charlottesville did not carry this item either, although one meat handler suggested substituting a beef knuckle.  Geoff demurred.  Ultimately, they decided to use one pound of stew beef (chuck or round) cut into one inch cubes as substitution for the veal knuckle.

Notably, the name of this soup is Pepperpot.  The original recipe calls for 1/8 tsp cayenne pepper and one red pepper, the heat of which grants the name.  Certain non-Dutch members of the family were not endowed with a tongue congenial with peppers possessing a Scoville Score greater than 2.  In the name of family harmony,  we elected to withhold the peppers from the main soup, to be added by individuals to their taste if so inclined.

We focused on this recipe for Philadelphia Pepperpot supplied in The New Pennsylvania Dutch Cookbook by Ruth Hutchison, modified in a few ways (as is often the case with soup) and were very pleased with the result.

Years ago, Geoff's parents built an all-season “cabin” in the Pocono Mountains of northeast Pennsylvania. It was built on the eastern shore of Lake Wallenpaupack, a thirteen-mile-long, man-made body of water owned by Pennsylvania Power and Light. My sister and I spent many summers during our junior and senior high school years swimming off the boat dock, sailing a Sunfish, motoring in an outboard boat fitted with an Evinrude, and waterskiing behind the family speedboat. It was Nirvana for a kid.

Mom-Mom and Pop-Pop would episodically join us at the lake. Pop-Pop was of course attired in woolen trousers, a starched white linen shirt, necktie and vest, with or without the suit jacket, no matter what the season or temperature. His principal activity while at the cabin was setting fire to driftwood collected from the shoreline, sitting on a rock near the fire, and smoking a cigar. We never saw him do anything else between meals. There was a whispered suspicion that he was a frustrated arsonist.  When evening came, he would migrate back to the house and to the living room with the rest of the adults to participate in “happy hour",  then dinner prepared by Geoff's mother and Mom-Mom.

The trip to the lake was a four hour long drive through eastern Pennsylvania. State Route 309 roughly paralleled the course of the Delaware River and therefore passed through many classic Pennsylvania small towns and cities including Bethlehem, Nazareth and Quakertown. The Weiss kids looked forward to a stopover at the Quakertown Farmers Market, a rambling collection of interconnected low buildings, full of shops and stalls selling everything including food, used clothing, used books, toys, comics, regional furniture, antiques, etc. Geoff and his sister Pam saved their weekly allowance to spend wantonly on the myriad trinkets and candies to be found within its walls. An hour or so was spent in the Market inspecting the wares from many Quaker, Amish, and Mennonite farms and workshops, and the family would reliably purchase a big tin of sticky buns.

The first morning at the lake house always included a breakfast of sticky buns heated in the oven which converted the brown sugar topping to a delectable ooze. Pulled apart and eaten with fingers, a sticky bun was a kid’s perfect morning repast. It was soft, bready, reeked of cinnamon, was filled with raisins and nuts, and dripped with molten brown sugar. There is no way to eat a sticky bun unmessily.

A tin would last two days at most. The memory of those days stimulated this episode’s desire to create a mess of sticky buns. We reviewed five recipes from several sources and chose one because it yielded a reasonable quantity of sticky buns. Several recipes seemed less attractive because they generated 25 buns, or used lard or huge quantities of sugar. The final recipe was drawn from J. George Frederick’s wonderful compendium of recipes and history, Pennsylvania Dutch Cookery. In Frederick’s compendium, the buns are referred to as Schnecken, the Dutch word for snail, reflecting the tight coil of the bun mimicking the shape of a gastropod’s shell.

You’ll see that we had reasonable success with this recipe for making sticky buns.

Scrapple is one of those things that seems relegated to the great culinary garbage pile, right up there with haggis, blood pudding, chitterlings, menudo.  I must confess that scrapple has never been a major component of my diet.  Nevertheless, it was a Pennsylvania Dutch “delicacy” well known to my grandparents, a regularly recurring component of their breakfasts.  I remember watching a brown-gray loaf of scrapple being sliced into slabs and then fried in butter until covered by a brown crispy coating.  When offered a serving by Mom-Mom, my sister and I would wrinkle our noses and ask where the Froot Loops were located.

Well into adulthood, I retained a distant memory of scrapple and a curiosity about its attraction for the Dutch palate. I considered that perhaps my tastes may have changed with maturity, much as I have acquired a taste for blue cheese, snapper soup, or pepper pot.  Scrapple is simply a meat product loaf made of pork scraps, cornmeal, flour and spices.  Tradition holds that the dish dates back several centuries to a German product called panhaas or pan rabbit.  Corruption of this nomenclature has taken place since the immigration of Germans to southeast Pennsylvania, the ancestor of scrapple going by the names pawnhos, panhas, or pan haas.  The origin of the name “scrapple” has been lost in the mists of time, but can be dated to the early 19th Century when this archetype food was developed to use the leavings of hog butchering—unused pork meat, heart, liver, hog’s head—from which the fat was rendered, corn meal and spices added, and the resulting mush then molded into a loaf.  If you need more detail, we caution that the manufacture of scrapple, like sausage, should not be probed too deeply.  A loaf of scrapple is a tribute to the frugal disposition of the Amish and Mennonite cultural archetype, allowing nothing to go to waste.

On a late Sunday morning, we embarked on an experiment to investigate the inscrutable concoction that is scrapple.  In our quest for authenticity, we purchased a loaf of scrapple from a central Virginia Amish country market.  Manufactured by Kunzler and Company, a firm based in Lancaster, we felt we had found an authentic product representative of the Pennsylvania Dutch culture.  A glance at the ingredients provided reassuring evidence of “pork broth, pork, pork skins, pork livers” in addition to whole wheat flour and cornmeal.  We cut a conservative quarter-inch slab off the loaf, dropped it into a frying pan of hot olive oil and fried it until a uniform brown crisp form on the surface.  At some point, discerning that it was sufficiently cooked, we transferred the meaty wafer to a plate, split it in half and tasted.  To our relief, the flavor was not unpleasant; in fact, it was mild.  This raised that prospect that scrapple might serve as a substrate for adding other condiments and flavors.

Consequently, we decided to make an egg scramble with scrapple, chopped bell peppers, onions, salt and pepper, a recipe that served three people.

Here's the scrapple egg scramble recipe.

Shoo-fly pie is a legendary Dutch recipe found ubiquitously in Mennonite and Amish markets.  Therefore, it seemed necessary that we should probe the mysteries of preparing this icon of the German-American table.  

Pop-Pop liked to eat and drink.  He knew what he liked and made sure his wishes were known before the evening meal was prepared.  For example, a roast ham was always his preference as the main meat on the table for major holidays - Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter.  And he loved his sweets.  Like Funny Cake, a Shoofly Pie would occasionally emerge at the breakfast table.  Coffee was served in Eucharistic solemnity with this morning confection, a pie covered in a flour, lard and brown sugar crumble which concealed a wet bottom of molasses. Forksful of the pie were dunked in the coffee to achieve the classic melding of bitter coffee with the overripe sweetness of molasses.  As a kid, I never really cared for Shoofly Pie, regarding it to be crafted for the Dutch adult palate.  

We chose two recipes found in The Dutch Cookbook, Revised [Edna Eby Heller, Intelligencer Printing Company, 1960]: “Shoo-Fly Pie I” is billed as “The dry kind—good for dunking” whereas “Shoo-Fly Pie II” claims “This one has a ‘damp zone’”.  We made several observations during preparation of these pies.  The addition of baking soda to the molasses is uniformly found among Shoofly Pie recipes across several references.  Brief online research suggests that the basic soda neutralizes some of the bitter acidic notes of the molasses and provides a milder and sweeter flavor.  The addition of the soda produces an exciting effervescence in the molasses.  We exchanged vegetable shortening for lard, both for its aesthetic and salutary health benefits.  For both pies, some judgment must be applied about when the pies are adequately baked.  Shoo-Fly Pie I (SFP I) is definitely the firmer pie, and its doneness can only be discerned when the crumb topping acquires a light golden-brown bake.  Shoo-Fly Pie II (SFP II) manifested a definite fluid wave across its surface as it was placed in the oven.  Indeed, care must be taken to avoid allowing the liquid bottom to slosh out of the crust.  We felt the pie was adequately baked when a slight shake of the pan showed no fluid wave.  We sought the golden-brown crumb as with SFP I.  

The products of this effort proved interesting.  The liquid bottom of SFP I had gelled into a firm layer, and the pie was the less sweet, more savory of the two.  The liquid bottom of SFP II was much softer, and the pie had a sweeter, more appetizingly spicy flavor.  SFP II won the vote, hands down, as the preferred pie.  The crumb topping for both pies was disconcerting.  Loose, dusty small crumbs tended to coat the mouth and were best washed down with drink.  When the pie had been eaten, a large residue of crumbs was left on the plate—a quandary about whether it should be eaten or be discarded.  

We performed an uncontrolled study of the preferred style of pie among family members and innocent neighbors.  At the end of the day, about half the pie consumers enjoyed either pie, the other half unexcited about venturing into this realm again.  I am inclined to keep investing future effort in this confection.  In a wonderful book, The Pennsylvania Dutch, Frederic Klees waxes ecstatic about shoo-fly pie:

The shoofly is not a pie but a wonderful molasses cake with a rich piecrust below and a top covered with crumbs.  With a hot, steaming cup of black coffee it is heaven on earth, particularly after a long drive on a cold winter morning.  Although counted as a breakfast cake, it is good at any hour of the day or night.  The shoofly is a cake that the Pennsylvania Dutchmen far from home long for.

As for the shoofly itself, there are two schools of thought about the proper way to bake it: some prefer their shooflies gummy at the bottom and some do not.  

Nectar and ambrosia, pâté de foie gras, caviar, and terrapin have all at one time or another been fairly well thought of.  None can compare with shoofly.

Adoration for shoofly pie in the words of Mr. Klees strikes our hearts with uncertainty about our own Pennsylvania Dutch credentials. Having expressed some skepticism about the pre-eminence of shoofly pie, we question whether there has been some ancestral aberration which renders us unqualified to be arbiters of shoofly worthiness.

Here are our recipes for Shoo-Fly Pie.

It was not uncommon that my sister and I were dropped off at my Mom-Mom’s home when our parents were out of town for an extended period.  It was during these visits that we came to understand, tolerate, and in some cases, enjoy the alien concoctions that Mom-Mom presented to us at mealtime.  One of my fondest earliest memories is Funny Cake, a breakfast food. Crawling out of our beds mid-morning, my sister and I would struggle to the breakfast room table in our pajamas in a state of semi-wakefulness.  There on the table were eggs and sausage, a fruit of some kind, pitchers of milk and fruit juice, and… Funny Cake. 

The Pennsylvania Dutch Funny Cake is a pie shell that holds a layered filling - on the bottom is a richly sweet layer of chocolate hidden by a white cake filling.  The chocolatey bottom is a real surprise if you're not familiar with this concoction.  The “funniness” of Funny Cake seems to come from a couple of possible sources--first and foremost, primarily because it's a cake baked into a pie shell. However, various sources assert that it's "funny" because, in one way of baking it, the cake batter is layered into the pie shell first and the chocolate syrup layer is poured on top of the batter.  As the cake bakes, however, the layers switch positions, the chocolate sinking below the cake, hiding until a piece is cut and served. I will testify that Mom-Mom never did it that way, always applying the chocolate to the bottom then topping it with the cake batter. 

Baked until the top is a dark golden brown, the Funny Cake is cut into wedges like a pie and eaten with milk (for the kids) or coffee (for the adults).  The Funny Cake was so popular among us kids that we often made a pitch to have it served after dinner for dessert.  

Here's the recipe for Funny Cake.