My first language textbook

I remember it all so vividly, even over three decades later. I was sitting with my grandmother being let in on a family secret — it was, what seemed to me at the time, a secret language. Whenever my great aunt and my grandmother got together, they switched from speaking English to speaking Pennsylvania Dutch. I was captivated by them “talking Dutch” and sat often at the kitchen table, paying close attention to all these new sounds.

I don’t remember why, maybe because I sat there trying to understand, but my grandmother sat me down one day and showed me a cookbook. It’s just one of those run-of-the-mill tourist cookbooks that are so readily available in the Dutch County. This one was the Amish Dutch Cookbook by Ruth Redcay and published many times over since the 1960s.

Gram’s copy of the Amish Dutch Cookbook by Ruth Redcay

Inside the cookbook were two pages with kitchen-related images and their Pennsylvania Dutch translations. Slowly she went through them with me, pronouncing each one, and explaining anything that might be helpful. For her, Pennsylvania Dutch was strictly a spoken language; she didn’t have anything else to show me the language, so this was my first language textbook.

Words from the Amish Dutch Cookbook

She did use some of the recipes in it, but its function as a cookbook took second place for me. A couple of decades later, long after her death, I’d actually co-author a Pennsylvania Dutch language textbook. Grandmothers with cookbooks were fading fast and this was our tribute to them.

Johannes Enthauptung (29 August 2025), The Bullfrog Inn