I made these beans for a picnic and got raves all out of proportion, I thought, to the difficulty of making them or the cleverness of the recipe. They’re your basic beans intended to be served with barbecue and the receipe would be a good submission to a church fundraiser cookbook since they use a [...]

Most molasses cookies and ginger snaps harden not long after you take them out of the oven. The extra egg yolk keeps these soft for days.

3/4 cup butter, melted and cooled
1/4 cup molasses
1 cup dark brown sugar
1 egg + 1 egg yolk
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon [...]

I had something like this at a restaurant in Winston-Salem this fall. The catfish into which it was stuffed was thoroughly forgettable, but the stuffing was fantastic. So I ripped it off for Thanksgiving. For the rest of you it’s too late for Thanksgiving, but it’s never too early to think about next year’s menu! [...]

Unlike Southern-style bulk sausage, this sausage is not spicy, and it is meant to be made into links or patties. And unlike anything you are likely to find at the grocery store, you know what’s in it. Now, that’s not a knock against the random bits of pork that go into "whole hog" sausage. It’s [...]

Pennsylvania Dutch pot pie (botboi, in the dialect) is not a pie but rather a dish akin to Southern chicken and dumplings or chicken and pastry. The dumplings are flat squares made from a dough that resembles pie dough and cooked in a pot of broth—hence, pot pie.
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I can’t claim that these cookies are in any way distinctly Pennsylvania Dutch. But my Pennsylvania Dutch great-grandmother made pecan cookies, and my great-grandfather and father liked them enough to make her write down the recipe before she died.
The problem with my great-grandmother’s recipe is that the cookies harden almost immediately as they cool, [...]

While recipes for Shaker lemon pie are fairly common and lemon meringue is ubiquitous, I have not seen a pie like this outside of Pennsylvania. As it bakes, the filling separates into two layers: the bottom layer is a sort of lemon custard, and the top layer is something akin to a light sponge cake. [...]

My grandmother taught me to eat radishes. Or, I should say, I learned the habit from her; I don’t think she had any grand plan to indoctrinate me. She served radishes and scallions with breakfast, accompanied by individual dishes of salt for dipping. My cousin and I, aged about five, theorized implausibly about why the [...]

When I was young my mother tended a small garden. I’ve forgotten most of what she grew. I assume there were tomatoes (why have a garden if you’re not going to grow tomatoes?). Probably zucchini. My father would have insisted on parsley. There were peas, which I remember because when I was about five years [...]

This year (2002) we went a little crazy with the canning. Ok, I went a little crazy with the canning. This photo was taken in late October. The inventory includes (in roughly chronological order) strawberry-honey jam, blackberry jam, pickled beets, pie cherries, blueberries, dilled green beans, peach-honey jam, yellow tomato marmalade, catsup, tomato purée (red [...]