Today's Pennsylvania Dutch Recipe Book (1966) is brought to you by Pennsylvania Dutch.
Just in case you thought I meant this was a fund-raising cookbook for a Pennsylvania Dutch community-- Nope! I meant Pennsylvania Dutch brand noodles.
You may notice that they sold Bott Boi, now renamed "Square (Pot Pie) Egg Noodles," a style of noodles I've denigrated not because they sound terrible but because the name is likely to mess with diners' expectations. If you're looking forward to a pot pie with a crisp golden crust and a creamy filling, getting a dish scarcely different from, say, chicken noodle soup is not likely to make you happy.
This book offers additional ways to unsettle diners with "pot pies" that aren't pot pies at all, but at least the Creamed Chicken Bott Boi retains the "bott boi" (rather than "pot pie") name, so people with at least some familiarity with Pennsylvania Dutch dishes might know better than to expect a pot pie.
There's also an interesting Italian-by-way-of-Pennsylvania-Dutch recipe for Baked Lasagne.
I'm a bit mystified by the idea of turning ground veal into tiny meatballs that then get fried together with unshaped ground pork or sausage, as it seems like a recipe for everything to meld together as it cooks, negating the work put into the meatballs. Still, considering that lasagne/a has noodles in it anyway, at least this recipe doesn't seem like it would be a huge disappointment the way a "pot pie" might be. The worst is that this would likely be a scoop-and-serve casserole rather than one you'd cut. Well, the tomato sauce isn't seasoned with much beyond the garlic (which is actually removed partway through the cooking process), salt, and pepper, so it's probably pretty bland, too.... Maybe I'm being overly optimistic in thinking this wouldn't be too much of a disappointment to lasagna lovers.
Even though this book is intended to sell noodles, there's only a relatively short section, printed on orangey paper in the very center of the cookbook, devoted to using Pennsylvania Dutch noodles. A lot of the book doesn't seem to care whether readers buy noodles or not. In fact, elsewhere, the cookbook offers a recipe for homemade noodles.
I guess the company knows that modern cooks are too busy to make noodles by hand very often, so there's no point in worrying about a loss in sales.
The book also seems more interested in presenting Pennsylvania Dutch recipes like Schnitz un Knepp than in selling noodles.
I like the imagination in naming a dish the equivalent of "apples and buttons," but the "buttons" part just makes the recipe sound like a choking hazard. This recipe is even accompanied by a poem describing the dish's nostalgic appeal.
My favorite descriptive name might just be the one for brownies, though.
Neither Cake nor Candy! That's true... It also makes me want to call it "Neither Noodles nor Nasturtiums" or "Neither Cattails nor Cobras" or.... Okay, I know I'm missing the point and the title is trying to suggest that brownies have the bakery sweetness of cake and the dense texture of a candy while being neither one, but the idea that a concept as simple as brownies needs such an explanation is charming. (The raisins hidden in this recipe are far less charming!)
I'll close out with a few of the many illustrations the book offers, like a smiling woman feeding her chickens...
...or a horse-and-buggy drag race.
Just know that I've chosen a couple of the more charming illustrations and omitted an illustration of an extremely problematic array of people labeled with various national origins and ethnicities (along with a police officer, for some unspecified reason), all looking vaguely annoyed at being roped into the picture.
The book also includes a series of old-fashioned prints, captioned with old-timey aphorisms, and I will leave you with this dark thought.
The book induces a kind of whiplash between a sweet country charm and a darkness that might be easier to ignore, but they're both there, along with the bott boi.
You had the same idea I did about the noodle recipe. Show cooks what a pain in the butt it is to make your own. It's a brilliant strategy. Tell people exactly how to make them so they will buy yours instead.
ReplyDeleteEgg noodles are one of those foods common in my childhood that never really made it into my adult diet. I probably bought them a few times, but they just weren't worth it.
I get whole wheat noodles for soups in the winter, but the bag is usually expired by the time I'm using the last of them.
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