My mother was raised in the Hershey, Pennsylvania area, and although she has a severe dedication to chocolate, even more engrained in her are Pennsylvania Dutch idiosyncrasies that I find downright funny. My father adores her with her Dutch ways as he also comes from German stock (albeit without such flair). Mom still finds it incredible that she has followed Dad to an alien world with an alien accent and alien ways, but she has adapted significantly to cowboy country. Some days, anyway.
There are some things, however, that will never leave her. When it is time to straighten the house, she pipes up, “Time to red up!” When the lights are to be turned off, the phrase is, “Outen the light.” And aluminum foil is called by another name…. tin foil… regardless of what the package says. I could go on and on about the funny things she says but what I have loved during my childhood is the Pennsylvania Dutch influence on food and cooking and the stories that go with them.
Pickled watermelon, hog stomach, sauerkraut frothing in a crock in the basement. Whoopie pies, shoo-fly, Amish chicken roast, and buttermilk coffee dunkers. Sticky buns, scrapple, mush (cornmeal cooked for hours, then baked, then refrigerated solid, then sliced and finally fried), and schnitz pie. Gallons of King Syrup. Pickled red beets and eggs that are as purple as the beets.
And don’t forget that celery and celery salt is a staple. Can’t cook without it.
To accomodate my father, Mom has left many of her precious foods behind. There is one thing though that is deemed too high to overlook for long regardless of Dad’s opinion. And that is root beer.
As the story goes, my grandpa loved to make home brew root beer in the basement and he bottled it himself. It sat for a few weeks and then was ready for a tasting. If it passed the test, it was served as the creme de la creme. Batches were rotated as the bottles would eventually burst in the basement if they fermented too long so the eldest bottles were enjoyed first.
According to Mom, she really did not care for the taste of homemade root beer, but she never let on to her dad and drank it anyway. She helped him stir the sugar, yeast, extract, and water in a huge metal Utz potato chip can (but not the Utz can that the boys brought snakes home in). She scalded her hands in hot, hot water to clean old Coke bottles. And when it was time to fill those bottles and put them under the capper, she held the box of caps and slid them on the tops of all those bottles just before Daddy lowered the capper assembly to smash it around the rim of the bottle. She loved Daddy and those Saturday afternoons in the basement.
My mother would much rather have birch beer or root beer from the Pennsylvania Dutch beverage companies that have been around for a long time and will give you a detailed answer as to why they are superior, but she has found that the root beers here in Texas are tolerable enough. And to keep her children in tune with a fine family tradition, she encourages root beer floats. Here is Abigail with her very first root beer float during our Friday evening family time. You will see that Abby is in perfect agreement with Mom that it is gut to da lass dropt! Make sure you have the sound on.
