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Gifts of the Pennsylvania Dutch
| Article
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14693 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1988 |
4,176 Words |
| Author
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Don Yoder
Don Yoder is professor of folklife studies and American
civilization at the University of Pennsylvania in
Philadelphia. He is cofounder and former editor of
Pennsylvania Folklife, America's first folklife journal. He
is the author and editor of numerous articles and books, his
latest being Discovering American Folklife: Studies in Ethnic,
Religious, and Regional Culture (UMI Research Press, Ann
Arbor, Michigan, 1989); and The Picture Bible of Ludwig Denig:
A Pennsylvania German Emblem Book (Hudson Hills Press, New
York, 1990). |
As a little boy, I visited my grandmother's farm north of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Pennsylvania every summer. There I discovered a new world: the world of the Pennsylvania Dutch. I belonged to this world through my father, whose ancestor, Hans Joder, himself an emigrant from the Bernese Oberland in Switzerland to the Palatinate in Germany, came to Pennsylvania in 1709, nine generations back from me.
I spent the rest of the year in a large industrial town in central Pennsylvania, where my father was supervisor of the apprentice schools for the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, then in its heyday as the "standard railroad of the world.” My mother, from central Pennsylvania, was also partly of Pennsylvania Dutch background (somewhat watered down by the time it got to her), but partly also of British stock, descended from English and Welsh Quakers who came to the new world with William Penn. This makes me a real American hybrid. Central Pennsylvania's culture was a combination of Appalachian and general American features, with a somewhat diluted Pennsylvania Dutch underlay in most counties.
How different things were when I went as a "summer Dutchman" to my grandmother's farm. I heard my uncles and aunts talking "Dutch" with my father, and learned that the Dutch did things differently. Even breakfast was different. At home, in town, breakfast meant hot cereal, but the farm table offered pie for breakfast--luscious cold pie served in a soup plate with milk and sugar--plus sausage and fried potatoes and a Dutch specialty that caught my fancy immediately and has remained a favorite. This was scrapple (as Philadelphians call it), or, as the upstate Dutchman calls it, ponhoss (German Pfannhase or "pan rabbit"). It never was even close to a rabbit, being made, in fact, out of meat broth boiled at butchering time, thickened with buckwheat flour and a little cornmeal. (If it has no buckwheat in it, it just isn't scrapple--read your label carefully!) This mixture is solidified in a pan, sliced and fried, well browned into upper and lower crusts, and eaten for breakfast, although I assure you it is a tasty dish at any meal.
This farm experience, even in my passive absorption of it over a half century ago as a child, helped me to understand who the Pennsylvania Dutch are and to begin to see their many contributions, their gifts, to preindustrial, rural, small-town America.
As the word Dutch is now more or less limited to Netherlands Dutch, it always confuses outsiders that these people are called Pennsylvania Dutch. The main source of the
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