As a little boy, I visited my grandmother's farm north of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Pennsylvania every summer. There I discovered a new world: the world of the Pennsylvania Dutch. I belonged to this world through my father, whose ancestor, Hans Joder, himself an emigrant from the Bernese Oberland in Switzerland to the Palatinate in Germany, came to Pennsylvania in 1709, nine generations back from me.
I spent the rest of the year in a large industrial town in central Pennsylvania, where my father was supervisor of the apprentice schools for the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, then in its heyday as the "standard railroad of the world.” My mother, from central Pennsylvania, was also partly of Pennsylvania Dutch background (somewhat watered down by the time it got to her), but partly also of British stock, descended from English and Welsh Quakers who came to the new world with William Penn. This makes me a real American hybrid. Central Pennsylvania's culture was a combination of Appalachian and general American features, with a somewhat diluted Pennsylvania Dutch underlay in most counties.
How different things were when I went as a "summer Dutchman" to my grandmother's farm. I heard my uncles and aunts talking "Dutch" with my father, and learned that the Dutch did things differently. Even breakfast was different. At home, in town, breakfast meant hot cereal, but the farm table offered pie for breakfast--luscious cold pie served in a soup plate with milk and sugar--plus sausage and fried potatoes and a Dutch specialty that caught my fancy immediately and has remained a favorite. This was scrapple (as Philadelphians call it), or, as the upstate Dutchman calls it, ponhoss (German Pfannhase or "pan rabbit"). It never was even close to a rabbit, being made, in fact, out of meat broth boiled at butchering time, thickened with buckwheat flour and a little cornmeal. (If it has no buckwheat in it, it just isn't scrapple--read your label carefully!) This mixture is solidified in a pan, sliced and fried, well browned into upper and lower crusts, and eaten for breakfast, although I assure you it is a tasty dish at any meal.
This farm experience, even in my passive absorption of it over a half century ago as a child, helped me to understand who the Pennsylvania Dutch are and to begin to see their many contributions, their gifts, to preindustrial, rural, small-town America.
As the word Dutch is now more or less limited to Netherlands Dutch, it always confuses outsiders that these people are called Pennsylvania Dutch. The main source of the emigration was the Rhineland, but the Rhine starts in Switzerland, flows northward through France and Germany, and enters the sea at Rotterdam in Holland. In Colonial America these immigrants were called either "Palatinate” or "Dutchmen.” Dutch, in this case, is an old English word, meaning a person from the Germanic-speaking areas of Europe. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the long lineage of "Dutch" in this sense. Hence it is not, as many people suppose, a derogatory term, a misnomer, or a bad adaptation of "Deutsch."
The term Pennsylvania German, by which they are also known, has to be explained also. At the time of their emigration, there was no united Germany, but the immigrants were German-speaking, hence "Pennsylvania German" refers not to "Germans" in Pennsylvania (an insult to the Swiss who make up at least one-third of the population) but to people who speak German or a German
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