Dutch Treats. William Woys Weaver

iconic Pennsylvania Dutch recipe was preserved by Anna Bertolet Hunter (1869-1946) of Reading. Mrs. Hunter and her son, Wellington, were deeply involved in organizing the Bertolet Family Association; she more or less took charge of the women’s committee, which handled the refreshments for the various reunions. Her heirloom Dutch Bread was first served at a reunion held at Mineral Springs Park in Reading on August 5, 1900 and at many Bertolet family events thereafter. Like the Gerhart’s Reunion Cake on page 42, Pennsylvania Dutch heritage was thus verified through the medium of food.

      Recommended utensils: two 8 to 9 inch (20 to 23cm) cake tins at least 2 ½ inches (6 cm) deep.

       Yield: Approximately 20 to 30 servings

       Crumb Topping:

       ½ cup (60g) pastry flour

       3 tablespoons (45g) cold unsalted butter

       3 tablespoons (45g) sugar

       Bread Ingredients:

       8 tablespoons (125g) unsalted butter

       ¾ cup (185g) sugar

       ½ teaspoon salt

       ½ cup (100g) mashed potatoes

       1 cup (250ml) whole milk

       1½ teaspoons (about 15g) dry active yeast

       1 cup (250ml) lukewarm milk or potato water

       2 large eggs

       4 to 5 cups (500g to 625g) bread flour

      Before starting the bread, make the crumb topping by rubbing together the flour, butter and sugar until they form evenly sized crumbs. Set aside.

      Put the butter, sugar, salt and mashed potatoes in a deep work bowl. Scald the milk and pour it boiling hot over these ingredients. Whisk until the mixture is smooth and all the sugar is dissolved. While this is cooling, proof the yeast in the lukewarm milk or potato water. Once it is foaming vigorously, combine with the milk mixture. Beat the eggs until frothy and lemon color, then add them to the liquid ingredients.

      Sift the flour into the liquid mixture one cup at a time, stirring as you sift, until thick, sticky dough is formed. Cover and set aside in a warm place to triple in bulk.

      Stir down with a spoon. Grease the cake pans and dust with bread crumbs. Divide the dough into two equal parts and spoon or ladle it into the cake pans. Sprinkle the prepared crumbs over the top. Set aside in a warm place until the dough rises to the top of the cake tin. While the dough is recovering, preheat the oven to 350F (180C). Once the dough has reached a height of no less than 2½ inches (6 cm), bake in the preheated oven for 40 to 45 minutes or until the breads tap done in the center. Cool on racks before removing from the baking tins. Do not slice while hot. Serve at room temperature.

      Watch Point: If the dough is not allowed to triple in bulk in the first rising and double in bulk in the second, it will not bake properly and the centers will fall when taken from the oven. The first and second risings may require as long as 2 hours or more, depending on the temperature of your kitchen.

Easter Lamb

       Oschter Lammbrod

      Lamb-shaped breads baked specifically for Easter have long been popular in the Dutch Country. They were often placed in a basket surrounded by elaborately decorated Easter eggs near the altar in churches or featured as the centerpiece of Easter displays in bakeshop windows. Some of the oldest surviving earthenware bread molds from the 1700s are devoted to Easter Lambs and today they are greatly prized by collectors and museums. The general custom was to use any one of the yeast-raised doughs that also stood service for Christmas or New Year’s specialties. Thus, there was no particular traditional recipe associated with Easter Lambs; you used whatever sweetened bread recipe was part of your own family tradition. On that point, six recipes in this chapter can be used successfully to make an Easter Lamb: Apple Bread, Baked Anise Dumplings, Lebanon Rusk, New Year’s Boys and New Year’s Pretzel. The Dutch Cake recipe in the cake chapter will also work perfectly, since it takes easily to elaborate shapes. Full batches of these recipes will make two or three lambs, or even more, depending on the size of your molds. For certain, you cannot make an Easter Lamb without a mold, so a few words about what sort of mold to use.

      Aside from recent aluminum and glass copies, the most popular molds today are the now-heirloom cast iron lamb molds formerly made by the Griswold Manufacturing Company (1865-1957) of Erie, Pennsylvania. These molds are commonly listed for sale on eBay or stocked at antiques malls, and if they are authentic will bear the manufacturer’s number 866. Griswold molds are sturdy and were cast from high quality Minnesota iron. They will produce lambs about 10 inches (25cm) long. The firm also published a pamphlet recipe for making a lamb with their mold, but it is not a traditional Pennsylvania Dutch recipe. In fact, Griswold instructed its users to cover the lamb with shredded coconut to resemble wool. Pennsylvania Dutch Easter lambs were considered bread, so they were rarely decorated or iced. And since the lamb was a symbol of Christ, this bread was treated with a certain amount of religious reverence.

      Baking a lamb in an antique earthenware mold like the one in the illustration is not recommended. These valuable and irreplaceable molds crack easily (no steam vents), and if the dough expands too much the mold will separate during baking and create a seam line all the way around the lamb; this is unsightly and must be trimmed off with sharp scissors right after the lamb comes from the oven. Reproduction earthenware molds are attractive but invite a similar problem, and in any case they must first be seasoned by boiling in water for about 50 minutes with two or three squeezed lemons – the more lemons the better. The acid tempers the glaze and clay body to help prevent cracking. Repeated use of a mold is the only way to learn exactly how much dough is required to fill the mold perfectly during baking. I recommend making your first few trials with plain bread dough. Weigh the amount of dough that was successful and file that figure with your recipe so that there is no guesswork the next time you bake. Also, be certain that there is ample dough in the area around the head; this is often the part of the lamb that causes the most problems for beginners.

      Cast iron molds are better than other materials because they are heavy and can be sealed shut with metal clamps, thus assuring that no dough escapes. Iron molds must also be seasoned and that is done exactly like seasoning an iron skillet. The Griswold molds also have handles on both ends; this makes moving the mold in and out of the oven much easier – butter from the enriched bread dough can make the molds slippery, especially the glazed earthenware ones.

      Whichever dough you use, it should be given its final proofing in a mold previously greased and dusted with flour. Baking is done while the mold is on its side, one half serving as a “lid.” The baking temperature and time will be approximately the same as those given for each of the seven recommended doughs in their respective recipes, provided you position the mold on a middle rack in your oven. Keep in mind that cast iron tends to bake hot, so you may want to check on the lamb 10 minutes before it is done. Once fully baked, remove the lamb from the mold and cool it on a rack. It can be stored or frozen like common bread.