These three dishes, just before mentioned, are fried before eating. I have never seen hog’s-head cheese in “Dutch” houses. If the boiling-pieces of beef are kept over summer, they are smoked, instead of being preserved in brine. Much smear-case (schmier-käse), or cottage cheese, is eaten in these regions. Children, and some grown people too, fancy it upon bread with molasses; which may be considered as an offset to the Yankee pork and molasses.
In some Pennsylvania families smear-case and apple-butter are eaten to save butter, which is a salable article. The true “Dutch” housewife’s ambition is to supply the store-goods for the family as far as possible from the sale of the butter and eggs.
We have also Dutch cheese, which may be made by crumbling the dry smear-case, working in butter, salt, and chopped sage, forming it into pats, and setting them away to ripen. The sieger-käse is made from sweet milk boiled, with sour milk added and beaten eggs, and then set to drain off the whey. (Ziegen-käse is German for goat’s milk cheese.)
“Schnits and knep” is said to be made of dried apples, fat pork, and dough-dumplings cooked together.
“Tell them they’re good,” says one of my “Dutch” acquaintances.
Knep is from the German, knöpfe, buttons or knobs. In common speech the word has fallen to nep. The “nep” are sometimes made from pie-crust, or sometimes from a batter of eggs and milk, and may be boiled without the meat; but one of my acquaintances says that the smoke gives a peculiar and appetizing flavor.
Apple-dumplings in “Dutch” are aepel-dumplins; whence I infer that like pye-kroosht they are not of German origin.
In the fall our “Dutch” make sauer-kraut. I happened to visit the house of my friend Susanna when her husband and son were going to take an hour at noon to help her with the kraut. Two white tubs stood upon the back porch, one with the fair round heads, and the other to receive the cabbage when cut by a knife set in a board (a very convenient thing for cutting kohl-slaw and cucumbers). When cut, the cabbage is packed into a “stand” with a sauer-kraut staff, resembling the pounder with which New Englanders beat clothes in a barrel. Salt is added during the packing. When the cabbage ferments it becomes acid. The kraut-stand remains in the cellar; the contents not being unpalatable when boiled with potatoes and the chines or ribs of pork. But the smell of the boiling kraut is very strong, and that stomach is probably strong which readily digests the meal.
Sometimes “nep” or dumplings are boiled with the salt meat and sour-krout. A young teacher, who was speaking of sour-krout and nep, was asked how he spelt this word. He did not know, and said he did not care, so he got the nep.
“As Dutch as sour-krout,” has become a familiar saying here. In Lehigh County, if I mistake not, I heard the common dialect called “sour-krout Dutch.”