As American as Shoofly Pie: The Foodlore and Fakelore of Pennsylvania Dutch Cuisine

Chapter 7. The Cabbage Curtain

CHAPTER 7 The Cabbage Curtain Unlike the Berlin Wall or the fortified borders that once divided Europe, the “cabbage curtain” is invisible and crisscrosses the Pennsylvania landscape like the willy-nilly flight of a distelfink. Yet it is the sturdiest of borders because it defines who is and who is not Pennsylvania Dutch by virtue of one odoriferous, iconic dish: sauerkraut. Nothing in the repertoire of Pennsylvania Dutch cookery is as much a key to preserving traditional foods and foodways as fermented cabbage; this one preparation serves as the pointed end of a phalanx of traditional dishes that depend on sauerkraut for their perpetuation in everyday diet. Thus the Pennsylvania Dutch who keep up their cultural identity may be readily identified as eaters of sauerkraut: they are the true “Sauerkraut Yankees.” They eat sauerkraut, and they eat it often in a variety of ways. The expression “Sauerkraut Yankees,” which served as the title of a book I published in 1983, was coined by Confederate soldiers during the Civil War as an insult to the Dutch. At the time the Pennsylvania Dutch cultivated a deep dislike for New Englanders (the true Yankees); thus among the Pennsylvania Dutch the term was so laden with negative weight that calling any Dutchman a Yankee was tantamount to picking a fistfight. Yet in an odd and perhaps accidental way, the southern stereotype of the Dutchman as a sauerkraut eater fit the cultural reality: sauerkraut was indeed the invis- 88 Chapter 7 ible border that separated the Dutch from the rest of Pennsylvania and Americans in general. I arrived at that conclusion while undertaking the research for Sauerkraut Yankees, but it was at best an intuitive inference because nowhere in the historical literature (published or manuscript) did anyone claim that sauerkraut was indeed the matrix dish that cemented together the many disparate parts of Pennsylvania Dutch culinary identity. Then again, that type of cultural/ethnographic question was not being asked—I may have been among the first to consider it, and sauerkraut was strangely absent from most nineteenth -century cookbooks, at least those used by the Pennsylvania Dutch. In hindsight this made perfectly good sense when one took into consideration that the production of sauerkraut on the family farm was more often than not a male activity (no need for such information in kitchen manuals) and that the various methods for making sauerkraut or its variants, made with turnips or even string beans, were mostly oral information. Recipes were irrelevant in any event because much depended on the type of cabbage used, the time of year, and a host of other variables—even the choice of salt—that only a well-seasoned farmer would understand. Thus while sauerkraut was a key dish, its production belonged to the arena of folk knowledge. After all, if you were Pennsylvania Dutch and made your own sauerkraut every fall, as most rural Dutch families did in the nineteenth century, you would have known since childhood how it was done. The absence of sauerkraut recipes of any kind was glaringly apparent in Die geschickte Hausfrau, the 1848 cookbook that served as the core text for Sauerkraut Yankees. How could this pamphlet cookbook, which was most certainly sold to a largely Pennsylvania Dutch audience, represent Pennsylvania Dutch cookery without including a recipe or even a reference to sauerkraut? It did not occur to me until quite recently that this was a book for Dutch townies, educated people who spoke decent German but whose basic lifestyle was more or less similar to that of other mainstream Americans. The Cabbage Curtain 89 For the farmhouse cook, this recipe collection represented a window into a larger world outside Pennsylvania, the flip side of the Pennsylvania Dutch personality that is American, as the old Berks County cook so aptly revealed to me during her interview. I inserted a sauerkraut recipe into my translation of Die geschickte Hausfrau because in my mind it needed to be there in order for the book to be Dutch; yet in reality the contents were not Dutch except in the nuanced ways in which they may have been interpreted in Pennsylvania kitchens. As I explained in the book’s introduction, most of the material was borrowed from cookbooks published outside Pennsylvania, and many of those cookbooks were already oldfashioned by the time the compiler, Gustav Peters, raided them for recipes. Such recipe borrowings are common in cookbook literature and...