Introduction Deep Fried Meets Dutchified: Food Mirrors the Culture In the Pennsylvania Dutch language "Dutchified" ( uffgedeitscht ) is slang for anything that is gussied up to look, taste, or in some way made to appear Pennsylvania Dutch whether or not it really is. A lot of locals use it specifically in reference to an overdose of decorative statement--such as a diner covered with neon hex signs--yet it can apply equally to people who accept or "convert" to the culture, to a peculiar way of talking, and even to a style of cooking or to a genre of folk art. Dutchification, if I may create that noun, is purely subjective and implies a heavily nuanced value judgment expressed within the Pennsylvania Dutch community; the general tenor is that the end result may border on gaudy and perhaps even tastelessly comic, since there is a hint of dry humor whenever the expression is used. For aficionados of popular culture, things Dutchified probably represent a subcategory of kitsch (in Pennsylfaanisch Edelkitsch , something so tasteless it creates a new definition of "good"). Likewise deep-fried food, which is not a feature of traditional Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine except for festive fare such as Fastnachts (Shrove Tuesday fat cakes) has been served up in bountiful platters of grease as though it represents a taste of our authenticity. French fries, fried chicken, fried scrapple, fried everything: easy fast-food fare has been conjoined with Dutchification in the manner of culinary Siamese twins to create a tourist cuisine that has come to exemplify the worst of gluey tourist-trap shoofly pies, or more generally the ambiguous and overly saccharine food of family-style restaurants proclaiming the "Amish Experience." This is a tale of kitsch begetting kitsch. There is perhaps no better example than the stultifying aroma-therapy scent sold in Lancaster County gift shops under the name of "Amish Friendship Bread"--as though all the day-to-day realities of an Amish farmhouse kitchen can be released from a bottle.

And yet behind this shopping cart filled with strange culinary mutants stand fascinating agendas that have pushed them to the fore. External issues from the larger world stage such as Hitler''s accession to power in Germany, American isolationism, and the need of many urbanized Americans to take comfort or to seek reaffirmation in the old-time values of a lost agricultural age all bore down on the Pennsylvania Dutch in ways not well understood by the outside world. The story that unfolds is a complicated one, not the least because the foods and foodways of the Pennsylvania Dutch represent the largest regional land-based cookery in the United States in terms of square miles covered, much of it outside Pennsylvania. Contrary to popular misconceptions, this is not the colorless, homogenized, deep-fried food peddled as the "Amish table" in the centers of Amish tourism in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and elsewhere. This is a food culture with authentic roots, a highly developed culinary tradition of classical preparation, and an extraordinary degree of internal diversity. Within the original area of Dutch settlement in southeastern and central Pennsylvania--the cultural heartland about the same size as Switzerland--over sixteen hundred distinctive dishes have been documented, most of which are not available in restaurants or even in local cookbooks. When we consider that there are at least thirty variant forms of milk tarts ( Schlappkuche, Millichflitsch , and so on), more than sixty variations of pocket dumplings or "mouth slappers" ( Mauldasche ), and several hundred sauerkraut dishes, the number sixteen hundred may even seem conservative; a great many more recipes lie waiting to be discovered through fieldwork. The complexity or diversity of this amazing regional cookery is one of the reasons that it has been difficult to encapsulate it in cookbooks and why there are so many mixed messages about its core characteristics in tourist literature today.

Food, like culture, does not stand still; thus this is a book about food in motion, food moving from old forms toward new identities, new authenticities, and above all else toward a new culinary voice. It is my hope that the common theme of food will draw together the disparate topics I have chosen as vantage points for viewing Pennsylvania Dutch culture from unusual angles: what it was, what it is today, how it is affected by class boundaries, how it is depicted in literary fiction, and of course how the Old Order Amish have been exploited as a lucrative culinary symbol. One of the recurring motifs in all that follows is an exploration of tourism and how in recent times this has imposed certain demands on culinary tradition. Over time these demands have shaped the way people within the culture, as well as those on the outside, have come to view the cuisine and to equate it with a stereotypical menu that evolved during the 1930s to fulfill the expectations of Lancaster County tourism. This was the beginning of the Amish motif in mass media culinary literature, which found its unintended endorsement at the Kutztown Folk Festival during the 1950s. As we shall see, this tourist menu is a fictional cuisine. Rather than deriving its distinctive identity from actual home cooking, a subject taken up in Chapter 1, it was informed by local-color novels and by travel journalism and then grafted onto 1930s urban rathskeller cookery under the guise of Amish--the culinary epicenter being the 1935 menus of the German Village Restaurant in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The Old Order Amish, who took no part in this evolutionary process other than to serve as objects of intense curiosity, were soon promoted as the only true representatives of the term "Pennsylvania Dutch," a misleading equation championed by the journalist and author Ann Hark, whose book Hex Marks the Spot and many magazine articles during the 1940s gave national currency to this idea.

For Ann Hark, the plain sects and the other hoi polloi were Pennsylvania Dutch, while the true keepers of the culture were the Pennsylvania Germans , a nuanced distinction that was shaped by her personal construct of class and cultural divisions within the Pennsylvania Dutch world: a presumption of the fundamental superiority of the Moravian social circles in which she grew up. Hark visited the Amish community much like a grand lady, moving from place to place in a touring car, arriving with a personal chauffeur (who was also her clandestine lover) in search of the quaint relics from the Middle Ages that she was convinced lay hidden in this closed religious sect. Like Ann Hark, I too have gone into the countryside and have spoken with the Amish and hundreds of other Pennsylvania Dutch of all religious persuasions, although I hope not in the same condescending frame of mind that distinguished Hark''s Moravian worldview regarding the "other Dutch." In addition, rather than cast the Old Order Amish as players on a stage of my own making, I have let my subjects speak for themselves. They share many of the same concerns you and I have about the way tourism has distorted the truth about them and about Pennsylvania Dutch culture in general. The only qualification with my material is that several people I interviewed declined to have their names published, but I was comfortable with that, given that their answers were honest and uninhibited, and from their standpoint safe from unintended exploitation. Another misunderstood voice heard from is that of the gentleman scholar and fellow Dutchman Cornelius Weygandt (1871-1957). I do not believe he was the nemesis of Ann Hark; they knew one another well enough, although his approach to the culture was entirely different, somewhat nostalgic but much more sensitive, much more in tune with the real roots of the Pennsylvania Dutch people, and he was deeply alarmed by the manner in which the Amish and other plain sects were being subsumed as the only symbol of who we are.

Many writers on Pennsylvania Dutch culture have cast him as a maudlin witness to the decline of plain culture; that was not his foremost concern. He was disturbed by the wholesale loss of cultural identity then taking place in all parts of the United States and how this would play out for better or for worse. For a long time it never dawned on me that Weygandt''s firsthand observations and special clear-sightedness were among the key influences affecting my thinking about the culture of the Pennsylvania Dutch, but they were, and I have learned to read and reread his books carefully because they are written in the linguistic code of someone raised according to the mores of the old Philadelphia social elite. That side of his persona is probably best expressed in his elegantly written collection of essays called Philadelphia Folks , which says as much between the lines as it does within the text. My loss is that I never knew Dr. Weygandt personally, but his early books such as The Red Hills and especially the later one called The Dutch Country captured the spirit of a Pennsylvania Dutch landscape very different from that of today, and his firsthand insights into people, events, and ideas of the times have created a framework for my own thoughts on these subjects. Unlike Ann Hark, Weygandt was conversant in Pennsylfaanisch, the language of the people: he could go to the heart of the problem with words only locals understood. He was also a wordsmith, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and--perhaps surprising given his other interests--an expert on the Irish theater.

Ireland is where he and I first crossed paths intellectually, because while finishing my doctoral work in Dublin, I discovered that I needed Cornelius Weygandt to help me untangle the meaning of the term "Pennsylvania Dutch." I knew or at least.