By Kevin Williams
I found a little gem of a cookbook the other day. Well, take that back, my 1-year-old daughter Bea found it. We have a big shelf of cookbooks in our dining room (the main archive of Amish recipes is in my home-office, but I also have a number of Amish cookbooks on our bookshelf). Bea always likes to pull herself to the shelf and tries to start pulling books off it. Some of the books are pretty heavy, so I always have to intervene so she doesn't have a copy of the hardcover Art & Soul of Baking come clonking onto her head. The other day though she somehow managed to reach into a stack and pull out a tiny hand-bound cookbooklet called "Our Favorite Recipes."
This tiny cookbooklet is packed with Amish recipes...
This is the book's back cover. Stoltzfus is a very common Amish name, especially in Pennsylvania. So I must have picked this up on one of my travels, but I can't remember when or where...
Most of the recipes are easy, authentic, handed-down-through the generations gems and this one for wedding chicken probably is one of them, but I couldn't decipher the instructions enough to share...Looks like something, at one point, was spilled on the book's pages....I don't think that happened at my house...
The cookbook doesn't have a date on it, doesn't have an author name, a city anything other than a hint that it is from Pennsylvania. I must have picked up the book on one of my travels years ago. Not surprisingly, the book is not available online anywhere that I could find. The book is a very low-tech product, held together with a hole-punch hole and bound with small pieces of fabric. It appears to have been handwritten (at first I thought it might have been a font intended to look handwritten but, no, I think someone actually wrote out the whole book)
Over the weeks ahead I'll explore some of the book's recipes...I have two for you today:
LIGHT WHEAT BREAD
3 /4 cup warm water
3 tablespoons yeast
1 /2 cup vegetable oil
1 /2 cup honey
3 /4 tablespoons salt
1 1 /4 tablespoons lecithin
1 /2 cup wheat gluten
3 cups water
2 1 /2 cups wheat flour
Mix ingredients with yeast mixture. Add flour till its the right texture. Let rise till twice its size and knead. Let rise again and put into bread pans. Let rise again in bread pan a litle and bake at 350 for 20 - 3o minutes or until golden brown.
CHICKEN CASSEROLE
2 pounds cooked chicken
1 can cream of chicken sup
1 cup sour cream
1 /2 stick butter
1 1 /2 cups crushed Ritz crackers
Pur meat in a 8 X 8 inch pan. Mix chicken soup and sour cream. Pour over meat. Melt butter and mix with crushed crackers and put on top of the meat. Bake at 350 for 40 minutes.
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