Inspirationists in the Kitchen

They are gentle women whose homes are decorated with crocheted bric-a-brac and pictures of great-grandchildren, and when they go, so will a way of living and cooking that will never be replicated.

The Amana Colonies, seven tiny villages in a vast expanse of Iowa farmland, were settled in 1855 by a group of Germans fleeing religious persecution. The Society of True Inspirationists, as it was called, lived communally, holding all property in common. The community, which had no connection to the Amish, supplied housing, clothing, education and jobs until “The Great Change” in 1932 privatized the society, disbanding the communal system.

Until then, homes were built without kitchens and food was provided in each village at central dining rooms, which each served 30 to 40 members three meals and two snacks daily. After the eighth grade, all girls were required to work in the communal kitchens, whose wood-burning stoves and coal-fired ovens turned out creamed chicken with potato dumplings, boiled beef and spinach, roast pork and red cabbage and desserts-- kuchens and kolaches , bread pudding, rice pudding and pies.

Marie Trumpold, 90, was one of those girls. So were Susanna Hahn, 85, and Marie Geiger, 80.

“I still cook the Amana way,” says Geiger, who on this day, as every day, has readied a noontime supper for her 60-year-old son. Today he will get baked chicken and noodles, mashed potatoes and cabbage, and cherry pie made from the fruit from her back-yard cherry tree and pitted with a 100-year-old cherry pitter, an antique from the communal days.

From her back-yard garden, Trumpold still picks yellow beans and cans them, and she makes spinach “the old-fashioned way,” frying onions in oil, adding bread crumbs and then the spinach, which has been boiled in broth. The coarse oatmeal she used to stir in the communal kitchen’s iron kettle is now instant and heated in her microwave, and the creamed chicken over noodles is made with packaged noodles, not homemade. Not all of her 23 great-grandchildren live nearby, but there are plenty of family members within easy walking distance who drop by for meals and talk.

On Sundays, says Hahn, “they all come”--referring to her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren who live in the area and help her prepare dinner, perhaps a traditional soup and dumplings. In fact, Hahn and her 87-year-old sister, Verona Schinerling, live in the kitchen house where she cooked as a young girl; Schinerling’s bedroom is where the old dining room used to be.

On this particular day, Hahn’s granddaughter and two children, who live across the street, have come for their daily lunch, which today consists of macaroni casserole, bread from the still-operating hearth bakery, home-canned cherries and pickled yellow beans, prepared with an antique bean slicer from the communal kitchen days.

Cooking in the kitchens was fun and collegial; Hahn remembers the singing. Trumpold recalls the older ladies who would tell the young girls, “Don’t get so wild.”

But it was hard work. Trumpold had to wake at 4:30 a.m. to start breakfast, which would perhaps be fried potatoes, coffee and bread. At 10 a.m., she’d start the soup. “I’d put on the potatoes, peel my onions,” she says. At 11:30, the main meal of the day would be served.

“There were long hours,” Geiger says. In summer, the “garden ladies” might come in with 14 bushels of beans, and the girls would have to string them. Or at the end of the summer, when everything was ripening at once, there was much to can; in the fall, the apples hanging in big sacks in the attic would have to be churned into apple butter or crushed into applesauce.

Kitchen bosses, chosen by the church elders, would train the young girls, and there were no written recipes. “It was always in the head, not on paper,” says Trumpold.

Of course, everything was cooked from scratch--coffee, sugar and spices were the only items that were purchased. Surrounding farms supplied beef, pork and grains; each kitchen had its own flock of chickens; orchards grew apples, cherries and pears; vegetables were planted in huge gardens surrounding the villages.

In fact, the 1.2 million-square-foot Amana Refrigeration Inc. manufacturing plant is located on land that was once a communal garden. (The company, which had been owned by the Amana Society, became a subsidiary of the Raytheon Co. in 1965.)

The baker would deliver bread every day on a horse-drawn wagon. Ten or 12 of the dense, firm-crusted loaves would be supplied to each kitchen, then sliced with a bread cutter, which was also used to turn homemade dough into thick noodles, says Viola Ratzel, 73, the guide to the Community Kitchen Museum. She was born in the house next door but was too young back then to cook in the kitchens.

Near the end of the communal era, the sense of community waned, as people began to pick up food from the kitchens and eat in their homes. In fact, one of the first things that was done after the Great Change was to remodel homes to include kitchens.

Cooking equipment was sold or given away, and many of the women from the community kitchens got jobs in local restaurants. Hahn worked on weekends at Bill Zuber’s restaurant in Homestead, a neighboring village, until she was 78, washing dishes, varnishing chairs and cutting up salad and dessert ingredients.

The restaurant, founded by Bill and Connie Zuber in 1949, is where the locals go, since many of the area’s restaurants do not offer traditional dishes such as a soup of boiled beef, spinach and dumplings.

The restaurants do offer plenty of home-cooked German fare, however, which is probably why the Amana Colonies are now Iowa’s largest tourist attraction. The food is served family-style, and there is generally enough to feed a family of 14. There are also many other food attractions, including a meat shop and smoke house, bakery and pastry shop, a brewing company and several wineries, which make fruity German wines, the best known being Piestengel, a rhubarb wine.

Even though the locals complain about the tourists, the population of the seven villages is only about 1,600, and there is a welcome quietude about the place. And despite the fact that the Amana Society General Store sells such distant items as sesame-ginger and green chile pepper fettuccine, every year Geiger still goes to the park to collect dandelions to make dandelion salad with warm bacon dressing.

To Geiger, the tradition will always be “our spring cure.”

Like all the following recipes, this comes from “German Recipes: Old World Specialties From the Amana Colonies,” edited by Sue Roemig (Penfield Press: 1985).

RED CABBAGE IN WINE

1/2 cup butter or margarine

4 cups red cabbage, shredded

1 cup Concord grape wine

2 cups peeled and sliced apples

Dash cloves

1 tablespoon sugar

Grated zest of 1 lemon

Melt butter in large, heavy skillet over low heat. Add cabbage and stir while cooking until cabbage is tender. Add wine and apples and stir to mix well. Cover tightly and cook until cabbage and apples are tender. Add cloves, sugar and lemon zest and cook 3 minutes more. Makes 6 servings.

Each serving contains about:

246 calories; 163 mg sodium; 41 mg cholesterol; 16 grams fat; 18 grams carbohydrates; .1 gram protein.

HAM AND NOODLE BAKE

8 ounces wide egg noodles

Salt

2 tablespoons butter or margarine

1 medium onion, chopped

2 eggs, beaten

1/2 cup sour cream

2 cups fully cooked smoked ham, cubed

1/2 teaspoon caraway seed

1/4 teaspoon black pepper

1/4 cup dry bread crumbs

Paprika

Cook noodles in boiling mixture of 6 cups water and salt to taste, stirring constantly 3 minutes. Cover and remove from heat. Let stand 8 to 10 minutes, then drain.

Stir butter and onion into noodles. Stir eggs into sour cream. Stir egg mixture, ham, caraway seeds and pepper into noodles. Sprinkle bread crumbs into greased 2-quart casserole. Pour noodle mixture into casserole. Season to taste with paprika. Bake uncovered at 350 degrees 40 to 45 minutes. Makes 4 servings.

Each serving contains about:

311 calories; 1,205 mg sodium; 207 mg cholesterol; 21 grams fat; 9 grams carbohydrates; 21 grams protein,

POTATO BREAD

1 package dry yeast

1/2 cup lukewarm water

1 cup milk, scalded

2 to 3 cups sugar

1 teaspoon salt

2 eggs, lightly beaten

1/2 cup mashed potatoes

6 cups flour

Dissolve yeast in water. Combine scalded milk, sugar and salt and let stand until lukewarm.

Beat eggs into mashed potatoes. Gradually beat in cooled milk mixture. Add dissolved yeast. Stir in enough flour to make dough manageable. Turn onto lightly floured board and knead until smooth, about 10 minutes. Place in greased bowl, cover and let rise until double in size, about 1 hour. Knock dough down and shape into 2 loaves.

Place in 2 greased 9x5-inch loaf pans. Cover with damp cloth, let rise in warm place until double in size. Bake at 375 degrees 40 minutes or until done. Makes 2 loaves.

Each one-inch slice contains about:

209 calories; 134 mg sodium; 31 mg cholesterol; 2 grams fat; 41 grams carbohydrates; 6 grams protein.

OMA MOERSHEL’S APPLE DUMPLINGS

1 1/2 tablespoons cold butter

2 cups flour, sifted

1/2 egg, beaten

1/2 cup sour cream

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 1/2 teaspoons sugar

1 teaspoon flour

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1 1/2 teaspoons water

10 apples, peeled and cored

Sugar

Cinnamon

Butter

Whipping cream, ice cream or caramel sauce

Cut butter into flour. Mix egg, sour cream, salt and sugar together and add 1 teaspoon flour. Dissolve soda in water and mix ingredients together.

Handling very lightly and as little as possible, roll dough into 2 sheets as for pie crust. Then cut into 6- or 7-inch squares, making about 10 squares. Put 1 apple on top of each square. Sprinkle sugar and cinnamon to taste and dot butter over each apple. Fold corners of squares over apple and place in greased baking dish. Sprinkle with more sugar and cinnamon and dot with butter. Put 1/4 cup of boiling water in bottom of dish and bake at 375 degrees until apples are tender and golden brown. Serve with whipping cream, ice cream or caramel sauce. Makes 10 servings.

Each serving contains about:

202 calories; 175 mg sodium; 23 mg cholesterol; 5 grams fat; 38 grams carbohydrates; 3 grams protein.