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

Chapter 3. Our Dumpling Culture and the "Swabian Third"

CHAPTER 3 Our Dumpling Culture and the “Swabian Third” The Swabians of Baden-Württemberg were attracted to Pennsylvania because they were for the most part Lutheran Protestants, unlike Catholic Bavarians who headed for New York or the Midwest , and they shared many cultural customs with other Germanspeaking groups who emigrated with them from the Rhineland. The American pretzel story was largely built on networks of Pennsylvania Dutch Swabians, such as the brothers Frederick and John Schwab, who set up bakeries in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, in 1860 and Shelby, Ohio, in 1866 and used the railroads to ship pretzels and bakery products back and forth. Indeed it was the Swabian-born bread baker Andreas Beyerle of Lancaster, whose 1745 case clock was carved with dinner rolls and a pretzel, who has provided posterity with the earliest documented image of a pretzel in Pennsylvania. All Pennsylvania Dutch bread bakers also baked pretzels; that was part of their training, and the pretzel was a symbol of their trade. The Swabian culinary hegemony is probably best illustrated by the family connections of Swabian-born Karl August Schaich, who purchased Kuechler’s Roost in 1905, demolished the original hermit’s lodge, and erected in its place the rustic stone restaurant preserved in popular postcard views (that reincarnation of the Roost was accidentally burned down by fireworks on July 4, 1919). Schaich was born in Württemberg in 1863 and came to the United States in 1889, eventually settling in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1891. 36 Chapter 3 His sister Louisa was the wife of Frederick Glasser, a well-known Philadelphia butcher and sausage maker. Schaich’s brother Frederick was a brewer in Baltimore. This microcosm of relations in the food business could be replicated over and over in every major Pennsylvania Dutch town, and it was this segment of the Pennsylvania Dutch community for which much of the German-language culinary literature was published and from which many of the core dough dishes emanated into larger Pennsylvania Dutch culture. William Vollmer’s United States Cook Book (1859), which originally appeared in German for Pennsylvania Dutch readers, was one such source of recipes. Born in Swabia and trained as a hotel cook, Vollmer worked for a time in a Philadelphia dining club. Not only were his recipes—both German and English— reprinted in local newspapers and almanacs , but also the nomenclature of many of the dishes was adjusted to account for Pennsylvania Dutch sensibilities. Thus Mauldasche (pocket dumplings), one of the popular foods in urban Dutch cookery, are called by Vollmer “Swabian Filled Noodles ” in reference to this popular specialty that is still considered a “national dish” in Württemberg.1 The oldest Pennsylvania reference discovered thus far for the term Mauldasche appears in Johann Georg Hohman’s 1819 Das Evangelium Nicodemus (The Gospel of Nicodemus) in material Hohman added to this apocryphal work. In it Hohman has Jesus addressing Saint Matilda, Saint Bridget, and Saint Elizabeth: Weisset , liebe Töchterlein, ich habe hundert und zwei Maultauschen von den Juden empfangen, which someone recently mistranslated as “Know ye, dear daughters, that I have received one hundred and two raviolis from the Jews.”2 This hilarious error arises from the fact that Maultaschen is folk slang for Maulschelle (slaps across the mouth); thus the most accurate way to translate Mauldasche (the food) is “mouth slappers”—just as Americans use the euphemism “pot sticker” for nearly the same thing in Korean cookery. FIGuRe 8. Mauldasche. Dumpling Culture 37 Most of the thirty-two recipes for classic Mauldasche listed in Herbert Rösch’s Schwäbisches Maultaschenbüchle (Handbook of Swabian Pocket Dumplings) were also known to the Pennsylvania Dutch. Just the same, Dutch cooks took the pocket dumpling much further and adapted it in creative ways to American ingredients, ingredients not used in the Old World, such as squirrel and groundhog , snapping turtle, smoked buffalo tongue, corn, squash, beans, ramps, and even catfish, chinquapins, and pawpaws. The fillings for Mauldasche were as varied as the Pennsylvania landscape, although the most ubiquitous recipe, commonly called “parsley pie,” was stuffed with parsley and served with parsley gravy—which to me is parsley overkill. Yet who would not be enchanted by the neideitschstyle Mauldasche stuffed with fresh spring morels and served with a green sauce of wild asparagus, or stuffed with toasted hickory nuts and smoked pheasant and served with a creamy chestnut sauce? These too are Pennsylvania Dutch, but...