Wednesday, July 1, 2015

As American as Shoofly Pie


I gave this a quick read as I was thrilled that someone was writing on this topic. A couple of complaints: he called many dishes, "poverty food." Maybe this is a standard term in food history, but do we have to make cheap food sound so bad?! I prefer "peasant food," which I think is delicious and sometimes cook. Second, he talked about a lot of commonly known Pennsylvania Dutch dishes as made for tourists. I'm not sure that this makes them disingenuous dishes. He found identifying them as tourist dishes to be an insult, but I think it's a lot more likely that I'll make the evidently touristy, but delicious chicken and waffles, and just not all that likely that I'll be making a dozen quarts of sauerkraut or, what is worse, cow's tongue (although cow's tongue was present at my great grandmother's house and our most recent family reunion). Finally, he left out pigeons (the stuffed cabbage leaves that have got to be Pennsylvania Dutch) entirely.

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