Goschenhoppen 2017 Part 2

Food, Glorious Food!

Hello! If you're a regular, you know I love to bake. (giggles) If you're a new visitor, WELCOME, and now you too know I love to bake. So the food at the Goschenhoppen Folk Festival was what I really wanted to see. There was sooo much neat food, I just couldn't report on it all. Then I remembered Lanie had visited the sauerkraut and preserving demonstrations when she went to the festival; and she also talked about potato candy. Yay!

We started the day with a fastnacht split topped with molasses. Yum! We usually talk about these in the winter. Xyra almost forgot the molasses, but we stopped by the 19th Century "house" and borrowed some from them. Doesn't it look tasty?

The best way to describe them is as a doughnut without a hole. But you also need to know fastnacht dough is made with potatoes and yeast then rolled out, cut into squares and fried. 

If you didn't want to buy a whole one, you could get a sample from the demonstration.

Yesterday I mentioned bot boi...pot pie. Pot pie in this area has noodles not a crust. The best has homemade noodles. They make the dough in bowls like this, roll it out really thin, and cut it into squares ore rectangles.

Here they are laying out the noodle dough to dry. There were six sets of noodles drying for the next batch of pot pie. 

They make three types of pot pie each day: chicken, ham, and sausage. The base and seasoning is the same for each; only the meat changes. We were able to get some of the ham, but missed out on the other two.

All of the food demonstrators had their recipes out so visitors could see what was going into each item. Ingredients were simple. Items from the garden, field, or barn. Not a lot of special spices: salt, parsley, vinegar, maybe a bit of sugar. This demonstration was making pepper cabbage and cucumber salad. 

Pepper cabbage is kind of like cole slaw, but not creamy. The recipe is simple enough, but the main items, cabbage and green pepper, need to be chopped super, super fine! The woman was pressing the water out of sliced cucumbers for the cucumber salad. The bowl with the cucumber slices has holes to let the water or liquid drain through to the bottom bowl.

So I have to tell you, I'm not sharing any links for these recipes, because everything I am finding online is not, and I mean NOT right. They are jazzed up with other things that would not have been available to the Pennsylvania Dutch in this area. We will find what we can and post them later. 

Vinegar is big in this area! They even made a drink with it called shrub. The most popular type is raspberry shrub. You can see it looks like cranberry juice, well, raspberry juice.

Here's the recipe. You might have to zoom in to see it better.

Nana Kestral likes it and talks about how refreshing it can be. Even Franz likes it. It's a bit much for me, but I'm glad I tried it.

Woo hoo! Apea cake. We just call it AP cake at home. You may find it with many different spellings: apeas, apea, apey, or even hard tack. We've posted about this twice already because Xyra says, "I could live off AP cake!" (giggles)

The demonstration also had a Boyertown version made with molasses.

It's darker than the regular recipe and moister, um, more moist too. (giggles) Very tasty.

Over on the 18th century side of the festival, the house was making chicken and waffles. Our chicken and waffles is not like what you'd find in the southern states or at your local Popeye's. It's roasted, shredded chicken on a waffle with or without gravy.

If you look just to the right of the pokers leaning up against the hearth you can see a brownish dot...that's a chicken cooking. Can you imagine trying to cook on a hearth like that? Those women knew what they were doing. No temperature gauges or timers!

This bowl of root vegetables will go into something tasty, I'm sure.

Now try frying over a hearth! These ladies made the best fritters and drop doughnuts. The fritters were apple or corn. The drop doughnuts looked like what we call munchkins or doughnut holes.

This tin holds the flour.

I saved my favorite for last. PIES! Here you can see their work area for assembling the pies. Pies can be sweet or savory.

Check out this oven! You have to keep it stoked. Getting a pie perfect from one of those took great talent! Hmm, looks like a peach pie will be made sometime today.

Here are some of the done pies on the cooling rack. 

Berry on top. The one next to it could be ground cherry. Although, that usually has a top crust. The second shelf is peach custard and another berry. I'm not sure what's on the bottom. I was so excited I forgot to take notes.

Of course, we also have to talk dumplings. They had apple and peach available warm. This is our apple. 

Very tasty with the milk on top.

Wow! That was a lot of food and I didn't show you all that was there! Have to leave something for next year! What would have been your favorite? It's all really good.

That's all for today. Feel free to ask questions! We will try to find the recipes to share and post them. Many are available in the official Goschenhoppen Historians Folk Festival Recipe Book. Come back again tomorrow!

Machts gut!

#GHFF51