At least, that’s how Tom Kelchner describes his journey.

Since 2020, this retired journalist has made meals historical past his ardour.

“There’s this rich texture of recipes throughout the 19th and 20th centuries,” the Carlisle man mentioned. “I can take a recipe, make it and taste the same flavors that people enjoyed all those years ago.”

Sitting upstairs at his laptop, Kelchner got here throughout a pleasant morsel, a eureka second, as he was scanning the contents of the Cumberland Valley Cook and General Recipe Book.

Right there, in entrance of him, was maybe the oldest documented recipe for shoo-fly pie – the molasses and crumb breakfast dish made well-known by the Pennsylvania Dutch.

Ketchner couldn’t include his pleasure. He went downstairs, discovered his spouse, and informed her of the invention. It introduced again reminiscences of house and household.

“We’ve made shoo-fly pies our entire lifetimes … both of us,” Kelchner mentioned. “My wife remembers her mother, grandmother and aunts serving the stuff.”

He made this discovery throughout a private quest to analysis the historical past of the neighborhood cookbook. While the title instructed the purpose of origin as Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, the version that Kelchner discovered was printed in 1881 in Topeka, Kansas.

“Now, wait a minute. … What’s with this?” he recalled asking himself. Familiar with analysis, Kelchner turned to newspapers.com, a web based archive of digitized publications. He additionally delved into the sources accessible on the Cumberland County Historical Society in downtown Carlisle.

Kelchner used what he realized to write down the introduction for a brand new version that particulars the background of the Cumberland Valley cookbook whereas together with a facsimile copy of its 1881 contents. Copies of his e book can be found for buy at History on High, the historic society present store.

The cookbook started as a mission of J.B. Morrow, editor of the Star and Enterprise, a newspaper in Newville. Morrow had printed an advert soliciting recipes from girls in Cumberland County.

“The deal was any local lady who submitted three or more recipes would get a copy of the cookbook free when it finished,” Kelchner mentioned. “Morrow hoped to have it finished by the end of 1875.”

The response was so overwhelming the editor needed to delay manufacturing of the cookbook. “When it finally got out in 1876, it was so popular that there was a second edition in 1878,” Kelchner mentioned.

The irony is the one surviving copy of the contents is a pirated version printed in Kansas in 1881 that listed J.A. Graham as the overall agent. Graham was Morrow’s brother-in-law.

During his analysis, Kelchner realized of the 1870s mass migration of Pennsylvanians to Kansas. According to the Oxford History of the American West, the lure of cheap farmland was the primary driver behind the exodus.

“Most people were farmers,” Kelchner mentioned. “They were having big families. When the kids grew up and wanted to have a farm, there was only so much farmland available in Pennsylvania. Kansas was wide open.”

A Civil War veteran, Graham was a struggling businessman in civilian life. He received caught up in the wave of migration to Kansas the place he began a butcher store, which burned down in 1881.

The concept is that Graham had taken a replica of the cookbook with him to Kansas and, at one level, handed it to a printer and mentioned “Here, print this,” Kelchner mentioned. Perhaps Graham wished to capitalize on promoting recipes from the Keystone State to a bunch of Pennsylvania transplants.

The 1881 cookbook has two recipes for shoo-fly pie, which is historically regarded as a Pennsylvania Dutch dish. In truth, the pie most likely advanced from a Centennial cake that was created – probably by a New York City chef – for the 1876 Centennial Celebration in Philadelphia, in accordance with Pennsylvania meals historian William Woys Weaver.

“If this is so, then the two Newville recipes were from the time of the invention of the dish,” Kelchner mentioned. “References to Centennial pie and shoo-fly pie began to appear in newspaper lists of county fair pie-baking contest winners in the late 1880s in Columbia and Union counties [of Pennsylvania].”

Previously, the oldest identified recipe for shoo-fly pie was discovered in a supply from Pennsylvania dated to about 1890. Boston-based meals historian Mark H. Zanger, writing in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, mentioned shoo-fly pie recipes appeared in the Talent Cook Book printed by the Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church in Mount Carmel, Northumberland County.

As for the identify, Weaver believes it got here from a touring act referred to as Shoofly the Boxing Mule, which was very talked-about amongst Pennsylvania Dutch circles, Kelchner mentioned. “I’m not going to question an academic historian, but there was a variety of molasses called shoofly molasses.”

In his analysis, Kelchner got here throughout a newspaper advert for Martin’s Bakery in Danville, Montour County, that referred to as it “A Centennial Shoo Fly Crumb Pie.”

“The name was still up in the air by 1910 or 1911,” Kelchner mentioned. “This bakery, very wisely, was trying to cover all possibilities from around that period.”

A Navy veteran and Shippensburg University graduate, Kelchner was a newspaper reporter for six years earlier than working in public relations and technical writing. At one level, he was the executive supervisor for the Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet in Carlisle.

His first e book “To Great Grandmother’s House We Go: American Comfort Food from the ‘70s, ‘60s and Before” was published in 2020. Since then, he also wrote editions one and two of “Chicamacomico Cookery,” which details the recipes of an island in North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Kelchner blogs in regards to the food and drinks of on a regular basis life at PaFoodLife.com.