Sauerkraut Yankees

by William Woys Weaver

Book Overview

A newly revised edition of a groundbreaking work in the growing field of food history, Sauerkraut Yankees offers recipes from an 1848 Pennsylvania Dutch cookbook, rearranged into chapters with... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812211456
• ISBN13: 9780812211450
• Release Date: April 1983
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Length: 218 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Excellent Study of a Major American Cuisine.

`Sauerkraut Yankees' by Pennsylvania Food Historian, William Woys Weaver is a treatise and concordance based on a Pennsylvania Dutch cookbook published in Harrisburg in 1848. Titled `Die Geschickte Hausfrau' (The Handy Housewife) and written in `Pennsylvania High German', it was a collection of traditional German and New World recipes done by a printer who acquired many of the recipes by simple plagiarism from many different American and German sources. While this book is based on the 160-year-old volume, the author contributes an enormous editorial labor to make the material accessible to the modern cook and scholar. And scholarly indeed is this exposition of Pennsylvania Dutch cooking in general. I am from a Pennsylvania Dutch background and have lived on the fringes of this world for all my life and I found things about this group that I have never heard before. And, after having read dozens of books on the nature of French, Italian, Italian regional, Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, Philippine, Greek, Lebanese, Moroccan, Turkish, and Thai cuisines, I have to say that this book gives as good or better treatment of the nature of its subject than any others I have read! It is important that what I mean here is not the culinary virtues of the recipes but the illuminating value of the scholarship. In fact, I would NOT recommend this book if what you want is a good book of Pennsylvania Dutch recipes. For that, you should go to any number of books by Betty Groff, Phyllis Good, or Mary Showalter. The latter's book `Pennsylvania Dutch Cooking' is especially good, larger collection of recipes. To that litany of world cuisines, I should add that I have not seen as good an exposition of either `Southern' or `Tex-Mex' cuisines, the two other most clearly defined `home grown' cuisines. While there are dozens of excellent books on `Southern' cooking, not one of them fully characterizes the essence of what distinguishes this cuisine from its European antecedents. Although I must say that southerner James Villas and New Englander John Thorne have both done excellent essays on important aspects of Southern cooking. Appropriate to the year in which Weaver's source text was first published, it was aimed at the original wave of south German immigrants to Pennsylvania. These are the Mennonites, Amish, Lutherans, and Moravians who came seeking religious freedom in William Penn's colony before the Revolutionary War. And, just as Italian cuisines were transformed by the greater wealth of food available in the New World, so the German's were able to indulge to the hilt all their culinary inclinations. Unlike the Italians who were virtual vegetarians due to the cost of meat in their native Italy, the South Germans tended to have a very high preference for meat over vegetables. The meat of choice, of course, was pork, as pigs were much easier to raise in Pennsylvania. Sheep did not do well in the Lancaster County summer, and lamb meat simply didn't work well in transpos

A Wonderful Read

If you are interested in German food or Pennsylvannia history, this book is for you. It focuses on the food of the Pennsylvannia Germans & how they adapted their own recipes from the old world to available ingredients in Pennsylvania. It talks about ingredients that were available to the Germans & how they prepared, preserved & ate the food. Mr. Weaver not only talks about the food but he includes interesting and sometimes little known facts about the culture that bring our Pennsylvannia German ancestors to life once again. I am so pleased that Mr. Weaver has taken the time to research and preserve for future generations not only the recipes but the stories and history behind the foods of the Pennsylvania Germans.