Going Big with the Pennsylvania Dutch

Amish Dutch Cookbook (Ruth Redcay, 1971) is supposed to contain recipes from Pennsylvania Dutch restaurants, shops, and hotels. Since this little booklet was clearly intended as a souvenir for families to take home after visits to such establishments, I expected the recipes to be written for families.

And just to be clear, a lot of the recipes did meet that expectation, like this Fisherman Soup (which I guess is meant for unlucky fishers).

No fish-- just ground beef, onions, potatoes, celery, tomatoes, and hardboiled eggs. There's no specified number of servings, but with a pound-and-a-half of beef and six potatoes, it's probably meant to serve six to eight. That seems pretty reasonable.

I was surprised, though, that so many of the recipes seemed to have been written for gargantuan families or smallish restaurants. A few at least seemed to recognize that they would be too big for typical '70s families, like this Canned Vegetable Soup.

When I saw the title, I assumed it was a soup cooks could quickly make with canned goods from their pantry, but it's actually a huge batch of vegetable soup (starting with eight quarts of tomatoes!). Home cooks were encouraged to can it for home pantries since they wouldn't be likely to eat it all at once.

A lot of other recipes are just plain huge, with no recognition that maybe actual families would appreciate either cut-down recipes or hints on how to store and use all those leftovers. I guess maybe the implied thought behind Amish Style Turkey Filling was that it should be for big family gatherings, given its Thanksgiving-y vibes.

I'm not sure many families with non-commercial kitchens would have the oven space to bake a recipe that calls for-- among other things-- a pound of shortening, eight pounds of bread, more than a dozen eggs, a gallon and a half of milk, and ten pounds of chopped turkey, especially if they wanted to serve anything other than Amish Style Turkey Filling.

There are also directions for making monster batches of Bot Boi, often translated as "Pot Pie" so cooks can disappoint crowds of people waiting for a crisp, golden-brown-delicious crust enclosing a rich, meaty filling, rather than just disappointing their own small families when they discover bot boi is just basically chicken noodle soup.

Of course,  we need a dessert to end on a sweet note, and the Pennsylvania Dutch are known for their Shoo-Fly Pie. Dutch Haven offered up their bakery-sized recipe.

I'm not sure how many home cooks really need to make 48(!) Shoo-Fly Pies at a time. It can't be many, but maybe that was Dutch Haven's attempt to make sure that tourists would just buy a shoo-fly pie instead of making their own? Nobody wants to divide a recipe by 48.

So, yeah. It doesn't seem like the main goal of this cookbook was to provide practical recipes for home cooks. I will leave you with this cute centerpiece, showing common kitchen items and telling (what I assume are) the Pennsylvania Dutch terms for them.

Bonus: The "Pigs Stomach Recipe" is small enough that you can probably make it just for the family, assuming you can find a pig's stomach and a family willing to eat it stuffed with smoked sausage, spare ribs, and veggies.