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      Pennsylvania is one of the few places in the United States where rich folk tradition and the culinary arts meld seamlessly to create a magical yet down-to-earth regional cookery, unlike any other in the Old World or New. Pennsylvania Dutch cookery – the real thing, not the pallid tourist knock-off – remains a buried treasure in America’s own backyard: not yet trendy, but moving in that direction. The 25 counties that represent the broadest extent of the Pennsylvania Dutch Country form a Switzerland-size heartland of culinary tradition based on local produce, wild-foraged ingredients, and a respect for the living soil inherited from Old World farming customs. The iconic stone farmhouses of rural Pennsylvania have become lasting metaphors for all that is American in the best sense of cultural fusion and a food culture derived directly from the landscape that nurtures it.

      The term Pennsylvania Dutch applies to all the many immigrant groups who came to this region from different parts of Germany and Switzerland. Many people mistakenly believe that Pennsylvania Dutch means Amish: it does not – the Amish represent about five percent of the total Pennsylvania Dutch population. The use of “Dutch” by colonial officials is an old English vernacular, which applied to anyone from the Rhine Valley: Low Dutch from Holland, High Dutch from Switzerland. Even William Shakespeare used this term, and not surprising, this is also the label the Dutch prefer themselves and for their language since their culture is no longer German. It quickly evolved into an American identity of its own, as the recipes in this book should demonstrate.

       Calendula – the official flower of the Pennsylvania Dutch

      While fieldwork has identified more than 1600 unique dishes not found in cookbooks or restaurants, I have culled from that list what I feel are the best from our baking tradition. This is the first book to explore traditional Pennsylvania Dutch baking, with about 100 representative recipes (I say “about 100” because some recipes contain other recipes within them so it’s all in how one counts). Most of these recipes have never before been published. Indeed, most of them have been acquired only through fieldwork interviews and come with back-stories – and often with folk tales as fresh and compelling as anything collected in the 1800s by the Brothers Grimm.

      Our food traditions have their own saints and sinners, their own stories, and a cast of characters as colorful as the lush, bountiful landscape that has produced them. Where else in America will you find the Waldmops? He is considered “lord of the beasts,” a father figure to all the forest creatures as well as king of the wee folk who protect our gardens and fields. Our Waldmops rules over fields and gardens and the “colors” of the four winds that define the year’s growing seasons. The moon may instruct us when to plant, but it is the green wind from the southeast that bears the warm spring rains required for a garden over-plus and the harvest bounty that makes the recipes in this book possible.

      You may spot our Waldmops cookie lurking along the margins of several pictures in this book. According to folklore, he wears a coat woven of willow leaves, spleenwort, and moss and dons a magical top hat fashioned from ivy, wintergreen and yew twigs – or from mistletoe when he can find it. Waldmops has a daughter called Ringelros (wreath rose) who is none other than the sunny calendula, the official flower of the Pennsylvania Dutch. She inhabits kitchen gardens to protect them and the farmhouse from plagues and pestilence, and thus figures in many recipes of a curative nature.

      The Waldmops can also claim a bad-tempered brother known as the Bucklich Mennli (little humpback man) who inhabits dark places in houses and barns. He is the bane of the Pennsylvania Dutch kitchen due to his pranks: ruining cakes, upsetting rising bread or stealing cookies hot from the oven. The old custom was to appease him by setting out a saucer of cream and a piece of cake on the hearth to keep him from meddling in household affairs. If he rose too far out of line, it was always possible to invoke St. Gertrude to send in her cats, since the little humpback man was terrified they would eat him – and they probably would.

      St. Gertrude was the patron saint of kitchen gardens and cats. Her official day was observed throughout the Dutch Country on March 17, the traditional start of spring planting for the Pennsylvania Dutch. Gertrude’s Datsch (a type of hearth bread, page 103) was scattered in the four corners of kitchen gardens to insure that the wee folk who lived there would continue to guard and protect it for the benefit of the household that oversaw its planting. Gertrude and Ringelros worked together to make certain that the bees found their nectar and that coriander yielded enough seed for Christmas baking, and caraway for cakes and pretzels.

      These characters, mythical or real depending on your closeness

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