Pennsylvania Dutch

Pennsylvania Dutch cookery does belong to Pennsylvania (although the style spread widely, notably to Ontario, Ohio and parts of the Midwest), but is not Dutch in the modern sense of the term. ‘Dutch’ here is either a corruption of Deutsch, meaning German, or, possibly, a survival of the archaic use of ‘Dutch’ to mean, in effect ‘Germanic’ or ‘German-speaking’. The influence of the Dutch themselves on N. American cookery way back can best be studied in the book by Peter Rose (1989).

Thus it may be more appropriate to use the phrase adopted by Weaver (1983) as the subtitle of his book on the subject: ‘Pennsylvania-German Foods and Foodways’. This scholarly work, later complemented by the same author’s book on Pennsylvania Dutch Country Cooking (1993), was based on a rare early cookbook in German, Die geschickte Hausfrau (1848), for use by the German-speakers of Pennsylvania, but ranges much more widely, setting the whole array of Pennsylvania Dutch kitchen equipment, ingredients, and recipes in their historical and cultural contexts.