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Pennsylvania Dutch Thanksgiving Menu, American, Pennsylvania Dutch

With Thanksgiving just two weeks away, it's time to start planning the annual feast and perhaps consider some new menus for the traditional fare.

The Pennsylvania Dutch country, north of Philadelphia, has its own lusty version of Thanksgiving dinner. The fields glow with color from vegetables and flowers and their women are famous cooks, careful, lavish, and proud of their inherited recipes and gigantic meals.

These Pennsylvania Dutch love boisterous dishes such as stuffed pig's stomach called "Dutch Goose", and scrapple and pickled pig's feet. But these popular dishes do not appear on their Thanksgiving tables.

Menu Items

For this special holiday they prepare: great tureens of soup, golden turkeys with a filling of potatoes and an array of homemade pickles and relishes -- Sucklepears, pickled whole; spiced crabapples, watermelon rind and yellow strips of spiced cantaloupe, green tomato and raisins, pickled cherries, gooseberry catsup, apple chow chow, and red pepper relish.

The feasting table also groans with apple butter cakes, burnt sugar or pork cakes, and prune cakes. They love fruit pies and serve them prodigally - candied apple, dried snitz, damson, green tomato, and prune custard. Often the top crusts are cut with seasonal decorations and they are always, brushed with butter or shortening and then dusted with sugar before baking. Thanksgiving soup is especially important. It could be chicken or corn, but as they live near the Delaware River, so rich in seafood, oyster stew is almost always a feast day favorite.

They garnish it with minced parsley and chopped hard-cooked eggs. Creamed corn is also a perennial favorite, made with corn dried during, the harvest season and then simmered slowly in butter, salt and pepper, and cream. Today, this Thanksgiving bounty is achieved without long hours in their spacious kitchens by using new convenient foods such as frozen condensed oyster stew and frozen fruit pies like the puffy fruit tarts of the colonial Pennsylvania Dutch area.

Notes For Serving

Contributed by The Sun, Thursday, November 12, 1959, 1959

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