I Grew Up in Southwestern Pennsylvania

This won­der­ful arti­cle was first pub­lished in Saveur issue #22.

After a life­time of wan­der­ing the world, it is remark­ably restora­tive to return to one’s roots and to the food of one’s child­hood, pro­duced in loam enriched by gen­er­a­tions of hus­bandry by fru­gal, indus­tri­ous Amish and Men­non­ite farm­ers. My fam­ily is as German-American as sauer­kraut, but my par­ents and my grand­par­ents, mem­bers of the gen­er­a­tions that fought against the Ger­mans in both world wars, didn’t talk about their back­ground. It was not that the older gen­er­a­tions denied their ori­gins, exactly; they sim­ply avoided the sub­ject if pos­si­ble. But their food gave them away—as food always does. Immi­grants quickly shed their national cos­tumes, their lan­guage, even their Old World names (Apple used to be Apfel), but it takes a lot longer for them to aban­don their favorite things to eat.

So we con­sumed a lot of German-American dishes, espe­cially on hol­i­days. Recipes were handed down, uncor­rupted, from mother to daugh­ter (and some­times son) as the decades slipped by—and my mother always man­aged to find things like slow-cooked apple but­ter and the smoky, spicy lun­cheon meat called Lebanon bologna at local farms or shops. We called these things Penn­syl­va­nia Dutch. Our fore­bears had been among the Ger­man and Swiss fam­i­lies that set­tled in south­east­ern Penn­syl­va­nia in the 18th and 19th cen­turies, then moved on to south­west­ern Penn­syl­va­nia and to North Car­olina, Ohio, Indi­ana, Iowa, and beyond. Slop­pily pro­nounced, “Penn­syl­va­nia Deutsch” (mean­ing “Penn­syl­va­nia Ger­man”) became “Penn­syl­va­nia Dutch”.

William Woys Weaver, the rank­ing author­ity on the sub­ject, writes in his book Penn­syl­va­nia Dutch Coun­try Cook­ing (Abbeville Press, 1993) that Penn­syl­va­nia Dutch food has Bodegeschmack—which is what the French call goût de ter­roir, the taste of the land. It is robust, boldly fla­vored, down-to-earth cook­ing. It is also mis­rep­re­sented and mis­un­der­stood. The clos­est most Amer­i­cans have come to tast­ing it is at the road­side indus­trial feed­eries in the Amish coun­try around Lan­caster, Penn­syl­va­nia, where sweet, over­starchy food is served in por­tions that would choke a sumo wrestler. The real thing is closer to Alsa­t­ian cui­sine than any­thing else (and seri­ous eaters know how lib­er­ally the Guide Miche­lin strews stars on the restau­rants in and around that French region on the Ger­man bor­der). Unfortunately—though they are Fein­schmeck­ers (gourmets) of the first order—the Penn­syl­va­nia Dutch have no tra­di­tion of first-class restau­rants or pro­fes­sional chefs. Theirs remains almost wholly a house­hold cuisine.

The cel­e­bra­tion of the Thanks­giv­ing feast begins, for us, with the assem­bling of raw mate­ri­als. The year’s last sor­rel leaves from our gar­den went into the soup, and our last few tar­ragon sprigs went into the stuff­ing. We used a few other prod­ucts we had grown our­selves, includ­ing the native but uncom­mon smoke­house apples for one of the pies. Most of the rest of the ingre­di­ents came from else­where in Pennsylvania—and track­ing them down was one of the delights of the enter­prise. Overor­ga­nized as ever, we started well in advance, lay­ing in a sup­ply of John Cope’s dried corn, which is such an indis­pens­able part of my family’s hol­i­day rhythms that my mother faith­fully sent it to me each Thanks­giv­ing dur­ing the three years I spent in Viet­nam. We shopped around for the rel­ishes that adorn the Penn­syl­va­nia Dutch table, end­ing up with five: bread-and-butter pick­les, pick­led beets, chow­chow, water­melon pick­les, and cel­ery ribs—some from Dietrich’s Meats and Coun­try Store (an extra­or­di­nary farm mar­ket in Krumsville), oth­ers from Dan Stoltz­fus (at the ven­er­a­ble Lan­caster Cen­tral Mar­ket), a gent with a gray spade beard who patiently explained which exam­ples of his art had taken blue rib­bons at the most recent South­ern Lan­caster County Fair in Quarryville.

A cou­ple of days before Thanks­giv­ing, we drove up to the heart of Amish country—a soul-satisfying, late-autumn expe­di­tion along rural Penn­syl­va­nia back roads. Silos punc­tu­ated the land­scape like excla­ma­tion points. We passed plows pulled by teams of four horses through fields of corn stub­ble turned golden by the slant­ing rays of the after­noon sun. We admired a local dairy farm, where Jer­sey and Hol­stein cat­tle grazed against the hazy back­drop of Blue Moun­tain. Our des­ti­na­tion, how­ever, was Eberly Poul­try, a third-generation oper­a­tion that processes chick­ens, turkeys, geese, ducks, par­tridge, quail, and more. All the birds are raised in small flocks by Amish and Men­non­ite farm­ers liv­ing within a 50-mile radius of Bob Eberly’s plant, and all are raised “as nature intended,” he told me, “with no pes­ti­cides, no hor­mones, no chem­i­cal fer­til­iz­ers, strictly free-range.” Old and new meet on Eberly’s doorstep near the ham­let of Schoe­neck (the name means “beau­ti­ful cor­ner” in Ger­man); horses, their breath vis­i­ble in the cold air, prance past the plant along Mt. Airy Road, draw­ing the boxy black car­riages used by the Amish, while semis hur­tle along the Penn­syl­va­nia Turn­pike a mile away.

Eberly’s free-range turkeys had won a taste test con­ducted by the New York Times a cou­ple of days before we got there. The phone was ring­ing off the hook, and Eberly was fresh out of gob­blers. For­tu­nately, we had decided before­hand that the cen­ter­piece of our meal would be a goose—a fowl more favored in Ger­man (and, for that mat­ter, Alsa­t­ian) cook­ing than turkey—and Eberly picked out a per­fect, 12-pound emb­den, freshly slaugh­tered and (as time would tell) dark and firm of flesh, full-flavored, almost gamy.

The late Novem­ber weather last year was miserable—cold, gray, with rain trail­ing off into mist—but that didn’t deter our six guests, most of whom trav­eled fair dis­tances to join us. Cather­ine, our daugh­ter, who came in from New York, had the flu—but that only prompted learned dis­cus­sion of the rel­a­tive mer­its of cham­pagne and whiskey as cures. The mood was spir­ited inside our stone farm­house (an Arts and Crafts–era struc­ture, built in 1914 from plans by Gus­tave Stick­ley). Our ebul­lient Wash­ing­ton neigh­bor Jurek Mar­tin puffed away at some notably nasty che­roots, obliv­i­ous to my demands that he desist, while our friend Robin Hill’s boxer, Schepsi, ambled ele­gantly about with a ban­danna knot­ted around his neck. We all spun sto­ries about absent friends and Thanks­giv­ings past, warmed by a big fire of Geor­gia fat­wood kin­dling and apple­wood logs that burned fiercely on the field­stone hearth. Cather­ine chat­tered gamely away between sniffles.

My wife grew up in Rich­mond, Vir­ginia, where a fes­tive gath­er­ing with­out Smith­field ham in some guise—usually with biscuits—was unthink­able. A close Penn­syl­va­nia Dutch equiv­a­lent, we had decided, were the ubiq­ui­tous local lit­tle potato rolls, made from potato flour, so we served thinly sliced Smith­field ham on those, and Bet­sey plied the crowd with cham­pagne and ham, ham and champagne.

Thanks to the qual­ity of Bob Eberly’s fowl and a clever steam-roast method of cooking—which drains the excess fat from the bird while pro­duc­ing a prop­erly crisp skin—devised by Julia Child, the goose was the best I have ever eaten. Our guests, for whom goose prob­a­bly seemed less eth­ni­cally imper­a­tive, exclaimed most about other things—notably the sor­rel and water­cress soup, mod­i­fied a bit from a recipe in Alice Waters’s book, Chez Panisse Veg­eta­bles (Harper­Collins, 1996), to cope with the short­fall in my late-season sor­rel crop. The Penn­syl­va­nia Dutch have eaten sor­rel since the 18th century—though sel­dom, I would bet, in a prepa­ra­tion as refined as this. A William Woys Weaver recipe for sauer­kraut with gin­ger, which sounds as unpromis­ing as chicken with licorice, won a lot of votes, as did my mom’s sweet and unc­tu­ous creamed corn. The stuff­ing (or dress­ing, as my fam­ily called it, for rea­sons unknown), made with dried morels, chanterelles, hen of the woods, and beech mush­rooms, after a recipe from Pennsylvania-born mush­room spe­cial­ist Jack Czar­necki, another friend, was also a hit.

And since this was Thanks­giv­ing, the one day of the year when all but card-carrying mem­bers of the gas­tro­nomic gestapo encourage—or at least forgive—wretched excess, there was even more: red cab­bage made in the sweet-and-sour style of Egon Ronay, the Hungarian-born Eng­lish restau­rant critic who first urged me to write about food two decades ago; herbed spät­zle, a mod­ern twist on the tra­di­tional Ger­man (and German-American) drop dumpling; apple pie (for which I peeled and cored the smoke­house apples on a funky old apple lathe); and Penn­syl­va­nia Dutch raisin pie—a del­i­cacy some­times known as funeral pie because it was often taken to griev­ing fam­i­lies. We served it all on Adams Rose plat­ters and dishes, 19th-century pieces that were made in Eng­land to the flow­ery taste of the Penn­syl­va­nia Dutch. For a final local flour­ish, we served minia­ture Hershey’s choco­late bars with the cof­fee; Mil­ton Her­shey, after all, was an enter­pris­ing Penn­syl­va­nia Dutch­man of Swiss descent—who turned a sweet tooth into a For­tune 500 company.

It all went swim­mingly, peer­lessly over­seen by Bet­sey in a 1950s rummage-sale apron. We had more food than wine left over, but not much of either. It was still rain­ing the next morn­ing, and we decided to post­pone a planned tour of the Get­tys­burg bat­tle­field and sleep in. The hardy Penn­syl­va­nia Dutch of yore would have thought us wimps, I knew, but after that din­ner, a sloth­ful morn­ing seemed the bet­ter part of valor.

This arti­cle was first pub­lished in Saveur issue #22.

Me as a zombie

You gotta try this! Zomb­ify your­self for free.
Try it here!

You Just Might Be a Yinzer If…

1.  I ask you to hand me one of those “Gum-Bands” an’ you actu­ally know what I’m talk­ing about.
2. You walk care­fully when it is “slippy” out­side.
3. You often go down to the “crick.“
4. You’ve told your chil­dren to “red up” their rooms.
5. You can remem­ber telling your lit­tle brother/sister to stop being so “
nebby.“
6. You’ve got­ten hurt by falling into a “jag­ger­bush”.
7. Your mother or grand­mother has been seen wear­ing a “babushka” on her
head.
8. You’ve “wor­shed” the clothes.
9. You didn’t have a spring break in high school.
10. You know you can’t drive too fast on the back roads, because of the deer.
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