Best-Loved Poultry & Stuffing Recipes

It is understandable that a folk who believed their cattle could talk on Christmas Eve may have been reluctant to dine on roast beef next day. If their Quaker neighbors sighed for the roast beef of Merry Old England, the Pennsylvania German’s were content to feast on wild turkey-and glad to get it. Moreover, as the years passed, and their own farms produced chickens and turkeys, they still preferred poultry for holiday meals. Their folklore attributed no wisdom or special "gifts" to fowls, so Pennsylvanians could go right ahead popping chickens into pots without a qualm. There were usually plenty of them on the farm, and as an immediate source of good food chickens met any emergency.

One of the old Pennsylvania Dutch songs dwelt hilariously upon the joys of farming:

"Ich fang 'n neie fashun aw," it says
A new fashion I'll begin,
The hay I’ll make in winter;
When it's hot I'll stay out of the sun
And eat the cherry pies.

I'll get a white, smearkase cow,
A yard full of guinea-hen geese,
A mighty high red-beet tree,
And a patent-leather fence.

The chickens I'll keep in the kitchen.

but this funny fellow knew perfectly well that the only chickens his wife would permit in the kitchen would be those that went into the pot! Chicken is always good eating, and with roper care even, you can turn an old hen into a delicious potpie before you can say Jack Robinson in Pennsylvania Dutch.

Chicken and waffles, chicken and biscuit, fried chicken, chicken potpie, roast chicken, roast turkey with stuffing ... how good they are in Pennsylvania! It may be true, as the old saying goes that “Roast pigeons will not fly into your mouth,” but roast turkey and dressing, Pennsylvania style, seem to do just that.