Our “Dutch” make soup in variety, and pronounce the word short, between soup and sup. Thus there is Dutch soup, potato soup, etc.; scalded milk and bread is “bread and milk soup,” bread crumbed into coffee “coffee soup.”
Noodel soup (nudeln) is a treat. Noodels may be called domestic macaroni. I have seen a dish in which bits of fried bread were laid upon the piled-up noodels, to me unpalatable from the quantity of eggs in the latter.
Dampf-noodles, or gedämpfte nudeln, are boiled, and melted butter is poured over them.
The extremely popular cakes, twisted, sprinkled with salt, and baked crisp and brown, called pretzels (brezeln), were known in Pennsylvania long before the cry for “ein lager, zwei brezeln” (a glass of lager and two pretzels), was heard in the land.
One of my “Dutch” neighbors, who visited Western New York, was detained several hours at Elmira. “They hadn’t no water-crackers out there,” he complained. “Didn’t know what you meant when you said water-crackers; and they hain’t got pretzels. You can’t get no pretzels.”
Perhaps not at the railroad stations.
We generally find excellent home-made wheat bread in this limestone region. We make the pot of “sots” (or rising) overnight, with boiled mashed potatoes, scalded flour, and sometimes hops. Friday is baking-day. The “Dutch” housewife is very fond of baking in the brick oven, but the scarcity of wood must gradually accustom us to the great cooking-stove.
One of the heavy labors of the fall is the fruit-drying. Afterward your hostess invites you to partake, thus: “Mary, will you have pie? This is snits, and this is elder” (or dried apples, and dried elderberries). Dried peaches are peach snits.
A laboring woman once, speaking to me of a neighbor, said, “She hain’t got many dried apples. If her girl would snits in the evening, as I did!—but she’d rather keep company and run around than to snits.”