Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled During Her Visit Among the "Pennsylvania Germans"Thomas, Edith May Bertels
General
Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled During Her Visit Among the "Pennsylvania Germans"
Thomas, Edith May Bertels
Cookbooks; Cooking -- Pennsylvania; Pennsylvania -- Social life and customs; Pennsylvania Dutch
"Well, Aunt Sarah," replied Mary, "I guess we've earned our monument.
The air that blows over the fields, wafted in from the open window, is
sweet with the scent of grain and clover, and certainly is refreshing.
I'm dreadfully tired, but so delighted with the result of our labors.
Now we will go and 'make ready,' as Sibylla says, before the arrival
of Ralph from the city. I do hope the ice cream will be frozen hard.
The Sunshine Sponge Cake, which I baked from a recipe the Professor's
wife gave me, is light as a feather. 'Tis Ralph's favorite cake. Let's
see; besides Ralph there are coming all the Schmidts, Lucy Robbins,
the school teacher, and Sibylla entertains her Jake in the kitchen. I
promised to treat him to ice cream; Sibylla was so good about helping
me crack the ice to use for freezing the cream. We shall have an 'Old
Song Evening' that will amuse every one."
Quite early, as is the custom in the country, the guests for the
evening arrived; and both Mary and Aunt Sarah felt fully repaid for
their hard work of the past weeks by the pleasure John Landis evinced
at the changed appearance of the room.
The Professor's wife said, "It scarcely seems possible to have changed
the old room so completely."
Aunt Sarah replied, "Paint and paper do wonders when combined with
good taste, furnished by Mary."
During the evening one might have been forgiven for thinking Professor
Schmidt disloyal to the Mother Country (he having been born and
educated in Heidelberg) had you overheard him speaking to Ralph on his
favorite subject, the "Pennsylvania German." During a lull in the
general conversation in the room Mary heard the Professor remark to
Ralph: "The Pennsylvania Germans are a thrifty, honest and industrious
class of people, many of whom have held high offices. The first
Germans to come to America as colonists in Pennsylvania were, as a
rule, well to do. Experts, when examining old documents of Colonial
days, after counting thousands of signatures, found the New York
'Dutch' and the Pennsylvania 'Germans' were above the average in
education in those days. Their dialect, the so-called 'Pennsylvania
German' or 'Dutch,' as it is erroneously called by many, is a dialect
which we find from the Tauber Grund to Frankfurt, A.M. As the German
language preponderated among the early settlers, the language of
different elements, becoming amalgamated, formed a class of people
frequently called 'Pennsylvania Dutch'."
Professor Harbaugh, D.D., has written some beautiful poems in
Pennsylvania German which an eminent authority, Professor Kluge, a
member of the Freiburg University, Germany, has thought worthy to be
included among the classics. They are almost identical with the poems
written by Nadler in Heidelberger Mundart, or dialect.
Mary, who had been listening intently to the Professor, said, when he
finished talking to Ralph: "Oh, please, do repeat one of Professor
Harbaugh's poems for us."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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