Plath Family Recipes: Recording American Culinary History

Professor James Plath, Professor and Chair of English at Illinois Wesleyan University, has published his family’s recipes in an online collection.  The recipes, spanning 5 generations of Plaths, are a testament of the profound presence that culinary traditions hold in our lives, as well as an intimate look into American culinary history. We have interviewed Professor Plath about the collection and his thoughts on American cuisine. 

Could you tell us a bit about yourself?

I was born in 1950 and grew up in Chicago’s Portage Park neighborhood, which lies some five miles west of Wrigley Field. Back then the neighborhood was mixed, with as many Polish and German speakers as there were English speakers. It was where little old women walked to the stores dragging their metal shopping carts behind them. Within a few blocks there were butchers, bakers, several small grocers, and a poultry shop where you pointed to live birds and then came back after a half hour to claim them, plucked and ready to cook. Life revolved around the neighborhood and church, which for us was a little more than a mile away—St. John’s Lutheran. I lived in Chicago until I was 18, then attended college in Utah, California, and Wisconsin. When I was the single custodial parent of four in my 30s, I learned to feed everyone for three dollars per meal. It was about as gourmet as putting mashed potatoes on slices of Spam, topping each with a slice of cheddar cheese, and popping them in the oven until the cheese melted. But the kids approved.

I remarried in 1995 and had two more wonderful children, so when we have family get-togethers they enjoy playing with my grandson (who’s two years older than my son) and granddaughter (who’s the same age as my daughter). None of it strikes anyone as unusual, and family dinners often incorporate at least one of the recipes from my website. They’re among many more included in a food-related autobiography with the working title Chicago’s Eddy Street: Memoirs of an American Family.

What can one find on the pages of the Plath Family Recipes collection?

Many of the recipes from these pages are family traditions, but they’re also the recipes I remember most or associate with particular family members. With some relatives—like the great-great-grandmother or great-grandmother I never met—the association comes from stories I heard about such things as the family’s sausage-making tradition, which became a rite of passage for my grandmother. With the great-grandmother I did know as a youngster, it was her kroppah, a dumpling that reflected her Austrian heritage. I still vividly remember this short, stout woman standing for hours in her kitchen, presiding over great kettles of boiling potatoes and frying pans of bacon. She wouldn’t allow anyone in the kitchen, but we could see her working and salivate accordingly. Then, when she was finished, she’d present the food and it felt like a major event.  I received an email from a family member in Austria who told me that they still make the kroppah that way. I find that fascinating. Many of the recipes included on my site are still family traditions, though some of them are much newer traditions. Some take a long time to cook, but some are really pretty quick and easy.

Could you tell us about the first Plaths to come to the United States?  What was cooking like in those days?

As far as my direct line of descent goes, it was my great-great-grandfather Martin Plath who immigrated from Pomer Province in Germany to the U.S. when he was in his 40s, in 1881. He went directly to Chicago. Everyone on the Plath side of the family seems to have immigrated here between 1866 and 1881, while the Kuester side, my mom’s side, we’re less certain about. The Germans resettled in Chicago, while the Austrians ended up in Milwaukee.

I wasn’t there, of course, to provide details of what cooking was like in those days, except to share a few stories that were passed down to me. I learned that both sides of the family made sausages and gave them to friends and family. My great-grandfather Plath also made his own wine, and my great-grandfather on my mother’s side brewed his own beer. Cooking seems to have been a tradition even then, with individual specialties as well as holiday traditions. Martin Plath would buy a goose every year and fatten it up by “noodling” it (overfeeding it with daily rations of homemade noodles), then butcher and smoke the breasts and legs to make a German delicacy called speckganz. They’d give that away too, to relatives. All of the women had “signature cakes” that they made for every special occasion or church potluck, and none of these were what you’d call quick and easy. Cooking was much more labor-intensive then, but no one seemed to mind that it took two to three hours to prepare a meal or several hours to bake a cake. And of course everything was made “from scratch.”

Have traditional Plath recipes evolved from generation to generation?  If so, what has influenced this evolution?

Some of the recipes remain unchanged, but the ones that have been modified have been changed mostly for the sake of convenience, and it’s not just recent generations. My grandmother decided years ago that using frozen vegetables was preferable to all the chopping and dicing that her mother did in order to make oxtail soup. Some ingredients like monosodium glutamate and the recipes calling for the addition of raw, uncooked eggs (like rice pudding) have been omitted or altered for health reasons. But for the most part the main family recipes continue four or five generations later as originally made. Why? Partly tradition, but mostly because they’re good.

What inspired you to create the Plath Family Recipes collection?

It was a way for me to pay tribute to my forebears without just tacking up a genealogical chart and saying “These are my relatives.” Besides, I really do associate all of those family members with the things they baked and cooked. It was how they defined themselves, in part, and how we all thought of them when they were alive and still making these wonderful dishes, and how I still think of them.
 
Do you regularly prepare traditional Plath meals at home?

My wife, Zarina, is the first woman I’ve ever dated who’s a better cook than I am, and what began as shared cooking duties has kind of evolved to where she does probably four-fifths of the cooking now—and seldom does she make the same dish twice. But when it’s my turn to make something, I’ll often revert to family comfort food. Especially when my adult children come for a visit or we have a holiday, I’ll definitely trot out the family recipes. We’ll have kroppah with pork tenderloin or schnitzel, and come Christmas we’ll get out my mother’s recipes for snowballs and the family shrimp dip recipe. I’ll often make my mom’s chicken parmesan just the way she did when casseroles were popular in the 50s and 60s when I was growing up. Same with her lasagna. And when we have picnics, I’ll make the family’s German potato salad that I remember eating as a child. Just this past week I decided to make Mom’s meatloaf instead of my own. I think there’s a strong relationship between family food traditions and what we consider “comfort foods.” 

Is there such a thing as American cuisine?  If so, how would you define it?

If you page through a comprehensive cookbook like Culinaria: The United States you’ll be tempted to conclude that with the enormous size of our country and the great differences between, say, the South and New England, there’s no such thing as “American” cuisine—only regional American cuisines. But if you take a closer look at how some of these things are prepared, you’ll find common denominators. American food tends to be hearty, not fancy. American foods tend to be easily prepared. And most of all, more American recipes fall into the “casserole” category than other cultures. We love our casseroles and one-dish meals, and I suppose this goes back to the potlucks that settlers and congregations perpetuated as traditions.

What is your favorite Plath family recipe to prepare?

Probably kroppah. It’s backbreaking work that takes two to three hours, but because it’s the recipe that’s so steeped in tradition, it almost feels like a ritual when I prepare it. Silly as it sounds, it’s almost sacramental. My great-grandmother died in 1975, and though she had 10 children, she was the only person in the family to make kroppah. When I asked for the recipe years after she was gone, everyone was more or less dumbfounded that anyone would attempt Great-Grandma’s kroppah. That was her specialty. But now two of my sons have made it as well. What makes it such a joy to prepare is that it is rare, and people seem to appreciate it as much as when Great-Grandma used to carry out the tray of kroppah to show all of us who waited, patiently, in the living and dining rooms of her Milwaukee bungalow.
 
For more information and recipes, visit Five Generations of Plath Family Recipes