Pennsylvania Dutch Cook Book

This `Pennsylvania Dutch Cook Book' by J. George Frederick is the next step on my search to find the best `Pennsylvania Dutch' cookbook. For many reasons, it is not the best `Dutch' cookbook for the average modern American amateur cook who happens to want to make some traditional Lancaster County dishes, but it is near the top of the titles I have found for documenting this great Southeastern Pennsylvania cuisine for the author(s) of more popular books. The first thing to note is that this is a standard Dover reprint of a book published in 1935. This means that since the book has a distinctly early 20th century point of view, before James Beard and before Julia Child and before Craig Claiborne, and certainly before the `back to the farmer's market' movement of Alice Waters and Deborah Madison. This being so, the introductory material is not only a narrative of the Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine, it is a testament to the mid-Depression view of the Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine. The first thing which tickles me about this point of view is that the author has no interest in the more politically correct `Pennsylvania German' term, since the ethnic origins of the Pennsylvania Dutch is actually the German, French, and Swiss lands bordering on the Rhine. (I can personally attest to this, as my mother's family that settled between Bethlehem and Philadelphia were originally German Swiss Huguenot clockmakers from Western Switzerland.) The second thing that appealed to me personally was the fact that the author includes my hometown of Bethlehem, PA among the five great cities of Pennsylvania Dutch homeland, including Allentown, Lancaster, Reading, and Philadelphia. There is even a recipe for `Bethlehem Scrapple Cabbage'. Talk about a `signature' dish! One of the most distinctive aspects of the 1935 point of view is the author's belief that all regional American cuisines are dying out, diluted into the great American soup pot (my term). The great thing about this perception is that it was either wrong, or the emphasis on regional culinary identities of the last 30 years has overcome and reversed this fading of local differences. On the other side of the coin, the author's claim that of the three great regional cuisines he mentions, referring to `Southern' cooking and `New England' cuisine, the Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine, based in a few counties in Southeastern Pennsylvania, has by far the smallest geographical base, yet it has some of the greatest culinary diversity. The only real competitor the author sees is the Cajun / Creole cuisine based in New Orleans. At first, I was inclined to take this statement as simply an expression of regional pride, until the author started to remind me of the genius of the Pennsylvania Dutch culture for preserving food and using preserved foods in a wide range of recipes. Is this not the cornerstone of the great Italian cuisine, with their wealth of preserved meats, cheeses, pastas, wines, and liqueurs? As a minor participant in

What an amazing book! I glimpse into the not-so-distant past when we couldn't just "log-on" and get whatever we desire. This cookbook goes back to the time of self-sustaining farms and communities. You can see this in the number of recipe variations that include the town where it is common. Anyone familiar with PA Dutch cuisine should own this cookbook!