Introduction

Pennsylvania Dutch cooking has always been the cuisine of my heritage. From my research, my great, great, great, great, great grandfather, Peter Baker was born in German in 1710. He migrated to the New World before the revolution. In fact, he was Peter Becker. The name change came when he came to America. Peter’s son, my 4 great grandfather was born in America in 1742. His son, my 3 great grandfather was born in Lancaster County on June 20, 1781. John was Peter’s son and begins life being born in the new country. Actually, John married a Baker from Franklin County. They had a son name Peter. He was born in Bedford County at Baker’s Summit on October 7, 1816. His wife was Mary Snider from a family that moved from Virginia to Pennsylvania. My great, great grandfather was Samuel S. Baker. Samuel and Catherine had a son (and my grandfather) named George Elmer, however is seems, they called him Elmer.

In Bedford and Blair Counties, Pennsylvania my family hailed from an area known as Morrison Cove. The valley goes for 35 miles from New Enterprise (Bedford County) to Williamsburg (Blair County). The valley’s width is 10 to 15 miles. The eastern edge is the Tussey Mountains and on the west the Dunning, Loop and Lock Mountains. It is here that my grandparents, except George Elmer’s wife, came from.

My grandfather Walter was one of those English among those Germans. In 1907, he married my grandmother Ida May Showalter.   When my great grandfather Henry Eastep married Margaret Garner, he inherited the German ancestry from Morrison Cove. There he picked up the Garner’s and Sorrick’s. In Germany, they were Gaertner and Sorg. The Garner’s and Sorrick’s immigrated in the mid-1770’s to the New World.

It seems that Morrison Cove became a location of original German immigrants through Philadelphia and Lancaster Country. It also saw German’s immigrating to the farm country from Baltimore and into the New World.

Most of my young life, except for two and a half years in Vienna, Virginia, I lived in the Harrisburg or Philadelphia, Pennsylvania areas. Pennsylvania German cooking was just something I knew about and learned from Mom, Grandma Eastep, Aunt Dot, and Aunt Fay.

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