German American Food: German American Foods in the Mainstream

German Americans have always been a diverse community, and their foods and foodways are diverse as well. Probably the largest subgroup is German American families, who are assimilated Americans and eat no more German American food than did Presidents Hoover and Eisenhower. At the other extreme are German-speaking communalists, from the Rappites of the 1840s through the Amana colonies in Iowa to the ongoing Hutterites, who copy out nineteenth-century recipes and eighteenth-century German-language sermons whenever they launch a new collective farm.