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As American as Shoofly Pie: The Foodlore and Fakelore of Pennsylvania Dutch Cuisine: By William Woy Weaver

A few years ago, I took a language course in Provence, France. The school organized a dinner of Marseillaise specialties prepared by a local chef. During the dinner, the chef asked the, mainly American, students about regional cuisines and the foods with which we identified. A Francophile professor who had accompanied a group of students from Chicago responded with a dismissive chuckle, “hamburgers.” William Woys Weaver’s exploration of Pennsylvania Dutch Culture in As American As Shoofly Pie: The Folklore and Fakelore of Pennsylvania Dutch Cuisine, offers one antidote to this kind of oversimplification of American culinary traditions. The Pennsylvania Dutch, as Weaver expresses, make up a diverse cultural subgroup of descendants of immigrants from many different German-speaking territories between the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to South Central Pennsylvania and parts of Ohio. For Weaver, the defining feature of Pennsylvania Dutch culture is not its language, but its cuisine. His objective in this is two-fold: first, to dispel the “fakelore” stemming mostly from 1930s tourism in Lancaster County that Pennsylvania Dutch is synonymous with Amish and second, to recover and record the “authentic,” domestic foods of this area of south-central Pennsylvania. The title dish of shoofly pie speaks to Weaver’s overall point that tourism marketing created a false image of Pennsylvania Dutch culture for mainstream America. Shoofly pie, a popular molasses dessert at roadside eateries in Pennsylvania and Ohio, has come to be associated with Pennsylvania Dutch heritage. However, its roots go back no further than the 1870s and the way it is served in restaurants differs from private consumption by actual Pennsylvania Dutch.