Best-Loved Fish &
Seafood Recipes
Philadelphia is the only
Pennsylvania city having direct traffic with the sea, so that
leaves the Pennsylvania Dutch pretty much dependent upon
Philadelphia for ideas about seafood. Indeed, in the old days
they were dependent upon Philadelphia if they got any at all.
The German’s like fish but do nothing particularly unusual in
fish cookery. They are extremely fond of lobster and crab as
well as oysters and clams, but rather more inclined to eat
seafood in restaurants than to prepare it at home.
My own most vivid impression of
Pennsylvania seafood cookery is the memory of my grandfather
occupied the kitchen to show them how to fry oysters as they
should be fried. Grandpa Baker showed everyone the method he had
learned in a Philadelphia club while attending medical school.
He claimed that he had paid the chef five dollars (no mean sum
in those days) to teach him how. So-for the rest of his life-he
taught all his family how to fry oysters whenever he did it
himself! It became rather wearying and the family would have
evaded his dinner invitations gladly if the oysters had not been
so superb.
The hubbub in the kitchen,
while he held forth was terrific, and everyone who could fled
the spot. But how they gulped down those oysters! I can hear my
grandfather shouting as though it were yesterday, his opinion of
“the damn fools who wipe dry an oyster and ruin it! It takes
away the natural goodness.
Dip them dripping, do you hear me?
Dripping! That's the way they fry oysters in Philadelphia.” It
is not recorded that he had any other culinary skills.
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