The Sights, the smells
One advantage of living close to the Amish/Pennsylvania Dutch population was the wonderful food. They had been coming to our area for years, as there was still a significant number of them in the county limits (by the 60’s, their numbers were noticeably thinner). There used to be a man who wrote a daily column in the morning paper that dealt with farm life/customs/lifestyles of these people. Sometimes, he even wrote his entire column in German!
Those of you culinary souls out there who have consumed the food of the PA Dutch folks know it is good old fashioned stick to your ribs cookin’. No tapas, sushi, or exotic seafood here. Generally, it was tasty comfort food that was terrible for your waistline, but you weren’t hungry when you left the table. Some criticize it as tasteless, but you have to get a taste of some of their more highly seasonable dishes. Their wares may not have been organic, but they believed in natural foods long before the New York Times ever made organic a thing.
Butchers with every possible cut of beef, pork, or chicken you mention. Chicken livers or hearts, sweetbreads or RM oysters, pigs feet or ears. All sorts of bizarre deli meats I get nauseous just contemplating even now: olive loaf, tripe, hog maw, chow-chow (wiki these only on an empty stomach0. But I shall make my confession to you, now, dear reader: I adore chicken pot pie, birch beer (keg please!) and scrapple. I discovered a restaurant on Long Island years ago that served sweet potato pancakes with apple butter…….fly me to the moon!
My wife is a convert to the joys of fresh scrapple made by butchers way out in the country. One of the first times I tried beer was at a wedding reception where kegs of birch beer and beer were side by side, so i did half and half. Everything tastes better with birch beer. And people wonder how I managed to drink a bottle of Anisette in high school.
Anyway, the farmers market used to be in these wonderfully odd buildings on the fairgrounds property. These buildings were also used for animal judging every year. Huge ceilings, and I could never convey the way the smells blanketed you in the door. As crowded as a noon Manhattan streetcorner. All sorts of stuff for sale, even comic books with half their covers cut (hmmmm, is this legal, I wondered) and a huge display of 20 different types of pretzels and potato chips. A kid’s paradise, except for all those vegetables.
Unfortunately, most of these architectural marvels burned in the 60’s in a fire that rivaled the Galen Hall inferno many posts ago (look it up–it’s a cool story). One building carried on, but it got so old they had to build a new home for the farmers market. The final building also went up in flames spectacularly.
