Ten years have gone by since Betty Groff passed away. In her eighty years, she became a treasure in Pennsylvania, and she received attention in national magazines, newspapers, and television shows. What got her such notice was her dedication to the foods associated with an ethnic minority, the Pennsylvania Dutch. In this context, Dutch refers not to people from the Netherlands but Germans, Deutsch. More precisely, it means people whose ancestors came to Pennsylvania in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries from the Rhineland and from northern Switzerland.
Anyone wanting to explore Pennsylvania Dutch cooking in more detail would do well to start with Betty Groff’s Up-home Down-home Cookbook, from 1987. She was a tenth-generation Pennsylvanian, descended from an early Mennonite settler, Hans Herr. His stone house, built in 1719, is still standing in central Lancaster County, and Groff’s strong sense of her heritage comes across in that cookbook, notably when she wrote, “Serving foods from your past means you’re sharing a part of yourself with them.”
In addition to writing cookbooks, six in all, Betty Groff and her husband, Abram (Abe, as he preferred), ran Groff’s Farm Restaurant, in western Lancaster County. Long before it was trendy, the Groffs were offering farm-to-table fare. One of the Groffs’ admirers was chef and cookbook author James Beard, who called their restaurant “one of the steadfast outposts of true Americana.”
In 1971, José Wilson featured Betty Groff and her restaurant in American Cooking: The Eastern Heartland. “People like to come here because I cook in the old style,” Wilson quoted Groff, “they say it’s just like eating at their grandmother’s house.” For Wilson, the setting played a large part as well. “The 215 year-old stone farmhouse in Mount Joy near Lancaster,” he wrote, “is filled with antique furniture and has mellow pine floors and a warm, friendly, lived-in atmosphere, with pots bubbling and burbling on the kitchen stove.”
What Wilson experienced was that, as in many traditional cultures, family and food are important to the Pennsylvania Dutch. It seems, though, that fewer Pennsylvania Dutch are preserving food for the coming year. Time was when their calendar was marked by ripening fruits and crops and canning or freezing them. For example, Wilson noted that each year, Groff froze “more than 600 quarts of sweet corn” boiled and cut from the cob.
Someone who shared Groff’s Pennsylvania Dutch background was Dwight Eisenhower.  In 1741, his German-speaking ancestors settled in south-central Pennsylvania; in the 1880s they moved to Kansas. When in his memoirs, At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends (1967), Eisenhower recounted his mother making a “monumental fried chicken dinner,” Groff, and anyone else from Pennsylvania Dutch stock, would have known exactly what he meant.
As it happens, one of Groff’s signature dishes was called Chicken Stoltzfus. Although the recipe had been in the Groff family for years, Betty Groff gave it that name to honor her neighbors, an Amish couple with the characteristic last name of Stoltzfus. The recipe calls for bite-size pieces of boneless chicken simmered in creamed gravy and served over crispy pastry squares; it requires a pinch of saffron and has a garnish of parsley.
While Chicken Stoltzfus was one of Betty Groff’s favorite entrées, one of her favorite appetizers could also serve as a main course. Her recipe for Glazed Bacon appeared in three of her cookbooks, and in December, 1991, The Morning Call newspaper of Allentown, Pennsylvania, included it in an article about Groff being invited to travel to Greenwich Village to cook for the James Beard Foundation. Then, in November, 2014, The New York Times chose Glazed Bacon to represent Pennsylvania in its article, “The United States of Thanksgiving.”  What glazes the bacon is a mixture of brown sugar, Dijon mustard, and red wine.
In Pennsylvania Dutch culture, a grave sin is wasting food, and when it had been preserved and prepared by one’s mother, grandmother, and aunt, wasting it becomes an insult to them. Some thirty years ago, a shocking outburst came from a lady who had moved to our Pennsylvania Dutch area from New York City. She was incredulous at a local custom of bringing baked goods to an event, baked goods she was expected to have baked herself. “Why,” she demanded, “should I waste my time baking stuff when I can buy it at the store?” Needless to say, for the Pennsylvania Dutch, baking has always been far from a waste of time, and Groff’s cookbooks include numerous desserts, from cakes and cookies to puddings and pies.
From 1981 through 1996, the Groffs operated as an inn a vast red brick house in western Lancaster County once owned by Simon Cameron, Abraham Lincoln’s first Secretary of War.
Before joining Lincoln’s cabinet, Cameron had been a United States Senator from Pennsylvania, and he distinguished himself by obeying the first half of Christ’s teaching to be as cunning as serpents and innocent as doves. A famous anecdote about him says that when a political opponent declared that Cameron would steal anything except a red-hot stove, Cameron demanded a retraction. Eager to do so, the man replied, “I was mistaken when I said he would steal anything except a red-hot stove.”
Cameron’s son, Donald, succeeded his father as a Senator and was a friend of Henry Adams. In The Education of Henry Adams (1907), Adams mused on his friend and concluded, “The Pennsylvania mind, as minds go, was not complex; it reasoned little and never talked; but in practical matters it was the steadiest of all American types; perhaps the most efficient; certainly the safest.”
Just so. Scots like the Camerons and Germans such as the Herrs and the Groffs settled in Pennsylvania long before the likes of David Hume and Immanuel Kant engaged in philosophical speculation. Instead, those early settlers dealt in basic realities of life, not least being how to keep a roof over one’s head and food on the table.
With her Mennonite heritage, Betty Groff grew up with a sense of Holy Communion as a spiritual and symbolic event. Still, as theologians of the Eucharist point out, a meal is also a sacrifice, and for Betty Groff and anyone like her, sacrificing time and talent to create a meal for others becomes an act of love and joy. When Betty Groff autographed her cookbooks, before signing her name she would write, “Happy cooking!”