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

Introduction. Deep Fried Meets Dutchified: Food Mirrors the Culture

INTRODUCTION Deep Fried Meets Dutchified: Food Mirrors the Culture In the Pennsylvania Dutch language “Dutchified” (uffgedeitscht) is slang for anything that is gussied up to look, taste, or in some way made to appear Pennsylvania Dutch whether or not it really is. A lot of locals use it specifically in reference to an overdose of decorative statement—such as a diner covered with neon hex signs—yet it can apply equally to people who accept or “convert” to the culture, to a peculiar way of talking, and even to a style of cooking or to a genre of folk art. Dutchification, if I may create that noun, is purely subjective and implies a heavily nuanced value judgment expressed within the Pennsylvania Dutch community; the general tenor is that the end result may border on gaudy and perhaps even tastelessly comic, since there is a hint of dry humor whenever the expression is used. For aficionados of popular culture, things Dutchified probably represent a subcategory of kitsch (in Pennsylfaanisch Edelkitsch, something so tasteless it creates a new definition of “good”). Likewise deep-fried food, which is not a feature of traditional Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine except for festive fare such as Fastnachts (Shrove Tuesday fat cakes) has been served up in bountiful platters of grease as though it represents a taste of our authenticity. French fries, fried chicken, fried scrapple, fried everything: easy fast-food fare has been conjoined with Dutchification in the manner of culinary Siamese twins to create a tourist cuisine that has come to exemplify the worst 2 Introduction of gluey tourist-trap shoofly pies, or more generally the ambiguous and overly saccharine food of family-style restaurants proclaiming the “Amish Experience.” This is a tale of kitsch begetting kitsch. There is perhaps no better example than the stultifying aroma-therapy scent sold in Lancaster County gift shops under the name of “Amish Friendship Bread”—as though all the day-to-day realities of an Amish farmhouse kitchen can be released from a bottle. And yet behind this shopping cart filled with strange culinary mutants stand fascinating agendas that have pushed them to the fore. External issues from the larger world stage such as Hitler’s accession to power in Germany, American isolationism, and the need of many urbanized Americans to take comfort or to seek reaffirmation in the old-time values of a lost agricultural age all bore down on the Pennsylvania Dutch in ways not well understood by the outside world. The story that unfolds is a complicated one, not the least because the foods and foodways of the Pennsylvania Dutch represent the largest regional land-based cookery in the United States in terms of square miles covered, much of it outside Pennsylvania. Contrary to popular misconceptions, this is not the colorless, homogenized, deep-fried food peddled as the “Amish table” in the centers of Amish tourism in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and elsewhere. This is a food culture with authentic roots, a highly developed culinary tradition of classical preparation, and an extraordinary degree of internal diversity. Within the original area of Dutch settlement in southeastern and central Pennsylvania—the cultural heartland about the same size as Switzerland—over sixteen hundred distinctive dishes have been documented, most of which are not available in restaurants or even in local cookbooks. When we consider that there are at least thirty variant forms of milk tarts (Schlappkuche, Millichflitsch, and so on), more than sixty variations of pocket dumplings or “mouth slappers” (Mauldasche), and several hundred sauerkraut dishes, the number sixteen hundred may even seem conservative; a great many more recipes lie waiting to be discovered through fieldwork. The complexity or diversity of this amazing regional cookery is one of the reasons that it has been difficult to encapsulate it in cookbooks Introduction 3 and why there are so many mixed messages about its core characteristics in tourist literature today. Food, like culture, does not stand still; thus this is a book about food in motion, food moving from old forms toward new identities, new authenticities, and above all else toward a new culinary voice. It is my hope that the common theme of food will draw together the disparate topics I have chosen as vantage points for viewing Pennsylvania Dutch culture from unusual angles: what it was, what it is today, how it is affected by class boundaries, how it is depicted in literary fiction, and of course how...