Cornmeal, Spelt, and Other Grains

The ancient diet of the rural Swiss, the core foods eaten from pre-Roman times down to the late seventeenth century, centered on three groups of foods: goat milk and goat cheese; pears, fresh, dried, and cooked down into pear butter; and barley and millet, both as grains and as bread flours.16 These are the foods that the Swiss today associate with the Gaisbauer (goat farmer), their term for hillbilly. Yet these were also the primary foods of the rural Anabaptists before they left Switzerland and eventually settled in Pennsylvania under the label of Mennonites. Standing behind millet and barley were two other grains—oats and spelt—as well as buckwheat, which became an important crop in German-speaking countries during the 1400s.17