Green Cuisine

The kitchen garden has yielded up many special flavors for the Pennsylvania Dutch cook. Ripeness is one of the key ingredients to creating a Pennsylvania Dutch “taste,” and it helps to be a gardener, for plants have a language of their own.

Peaches that still have “snap,” apples sour enough to pucker the lips, gooseberries as hard as marbles— unripe fruit was an old Middle European taste preference often noted by travelers through the Pennsylvania Dutch country. With the upsurge of sugar consumption in our cookery since the 1880s, this green cuisine has almost disappeared, yet it is preserved here and there in certain recipes that do not work with ripe ingredients.