Ollendorf, Carl (1717–1768), with later additions by Melchoir “George” Stecher (1737–1808) or Catarina SchneiderStecher (1734–1777). An Kochereÿen [On Cookery]. Bound manuscript in Fraktur and Kurrentschrift with entries in several hands, 1745 to 1777/1795. 8 ¼ x 6 in. approximately 180 pp. A page torn from a 1776 German-American almanac laid in. A section of pages after the recipes has been removed, otherwise in fine condition. Tightly bound in original block-printed paste paper binding, backed in calf, lightly worn.

Inscribed “Carl Ollendorfs / Lindheim / 24 May 1745” on front flyleaf. Additional ownership signatures of Melchoir Stecher (1737–1808) and Susanna Stecher (1787–1857).

Begun by a professional chef over a century before the publication of the first German American cookbook, this splendidly provenanced Pennsylvanian manuscript is one of the earliest and most substantial American manuscripts on domestic cookery yet to surface, and perhaps the earliest surviving source for German American cuisine.

The Cookbook

An Kochereÿen collects 308 numbered recipes plus a dozen pages or so of household remedies and other materials, of which perhaps one half were written by Ollendorf, a Moravian immigrant who identified himself as a cook and a tailor (Schneider und Koch) when he arrived in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1754. The rest of the volume was written by members of the household of his friend Melchoir Stecher, most likely Stecher and his first wife, Catarina Schneider.

Manuscript Hands A, B, and C

The manuscript is composed in three hands. The first 100 recipes (Hand A), certainly by Ollendorf, are written in a relatively ornate calligraphic hand. Recipes 101 to 153 (Hand B) appear to be written more hastily but we think these may also by Ollendorf, based on the angle of the writing, and the commonality of certain letters (particularly the capital “C”) with Hand A and his signature. Recipes 154 to 308 appear to be in another hand (Hand C), which we believe to be a member of the Stecher family, with whom the chef was closely associated in the decade preceding his death in 1768. The signature of Melchior Stecher appears in the margin beside recipe 118. There are also some childish writing exercises signed by Melchior’s daughter Susanna, including an exercise in English ("Susanna Stecher / her book I ges / she / can lern / to rite"). She was born in 1787, so we estimate 1795 as the terminus ante quem for the completion of this manuscript. If the hand is that of the woman Stecher married in 1763, then the manuscript would be no later than 1777, the date of her death.

Ollendorf’s recipe for “creth brulle” (crème brûlée)

Citing the work of Edith Hörandner, William Woy Weaver has noted that most manuscript cookbooks drew from published sources and generally served as aides-memoire, listing only information that the chef was likely to forget -- spice combinations or cooking processes. We could not identify published antecedents for many of the recipes here, though further research may reveal them. The first recipe here is for crayfish soup, and although one may find formulas for this delicacy in the cookbooks of Johann Sigismund Elsholtz (1682), Eleonora Maria Rosalia (1695), Andreas Glorez (1701), Maria Sophia Schellhammer (1723) and Susanna Eger (1745), the one here is more elaborate, including such vegetables as asparagus and cucumber. The recipes by Ollendorf generally are rather refined, requiring more than a single pot. This is what one would expect from a professional who would presumably have had access to extensive culinary resources whether working in a dining hall or in private service. A number of the entries in Hands A and B reflect the influence of foreign cuisines. There are recipes for baked “Englische Amoletten,” chicken “a la Blonesse,” sauce “a la Spaniol,” and sauce “Holländische.” This makes sense both because Ollendorf was not only a chef but also a member of an transnational community – the Moravian movement had a strong missionary emphasis and attracted convert throughout continental Europe and the British isles. The recipes in Hand C are much more traditionally German, which again would make sense because the Stechers were ardent members of a more insular Lutheran community. Among these are recipes for kugelhopf, chicken in horseradish, almond sausages and buckhorn fritters. There are also prophylactic recipes: a soup for the sick, a puree to nourish the pregnant. There are no recipes for potatoes, which did not enter German cuisine until the nineteenth century.

This "mash for women in childbed" in Hand C offers a nutritious, economical, and sustaining combination of breadcrumbs, lard, flour, eggs, and water.

The vast majority of recipes in this manuscript are for comestibles. Following the culinary recipes there is a gap where pages have been excised, and these are followed by domestic remedies [in Hand C, we think] and indexes. These include a remedy for rheumatism, and descriptive formulas for making candles. The last item in the text is a sample loan contract. Laid in is a page torn from the 1776 edition of Der Hoch-Deutsch-Americanische calender published in Germantown, printing a sample business letter (“Assignation des instehenden Bandes oder Obligation”).

The Cooks

Carl Ollendorf was 26 years old when began recording recipes in 1745 and living in a single-sex commune of the Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine, a radical Pietist movement that in America would be called the Moravian Church. A native of Tangermünde, Brandenburg, he was in Hamburg when – according to his later testimony -- he was “awakened by Brother [Johannes Georg] Weiblinger” (1704–1775) to the teachings of the Church. On 15 November 1740, he was received as a member in Pilgerruh, a communal settlement near Bad Oldesloe between Lübeck and Hamburg. A year and a half later, on 7 July 1742, he underwent the personal experience of surrender and rebirth that enabled him to be admitted into Holy Communion.

Carl Ollendorf is recorded as a "Tailor and Cook" in the Catalog of the Single Brothers and older boys in Bethlehem and Christiansbrunn, 1743-1755. Beth SB 47, p.13. Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, PA

In these years, the Moravian faithful were organized into “choirs” -- groups divided by sex, age, and marital status. Ollendorf was a member of a choir of unmarried men that lived together, ate together, and worshipped together. When he started compiling this cookbook, Ollendorf was numbered among the Single Brethren in Lindheim, where worship was characterized by an intensely homoerotic mysticism and, according to some scholars, a “ritualized homosexual intimacy.” In 1748, Christian “Christel” Renatus von Zinzendorf (1727 – 1752), the charismatic leader of the Single Brethern’s choir and the son of the founder of the movement, led a gender-changing ceremony, declaring that henceforth the men should consider themselves to be women and address each other as sister. This led to a crisis that would be called the Sifting Time; most of the records for this period would be purged by the Church. As a result, we do not have detailed information on Ollendorf’s career between 1745, when he started this cookbook, and 1754, when he recorded his profession as “Tailor and Cook.”

This 1758 view of Moravian settlements worldwide includes Lindheim and Herrnhut, 500 miles, apart, as well as the settlements in Greenland, Suriname, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. Whitefield House, Moravian Historical Society

Moravians comprised a transnational community, and by the 1740s had established missions in South America, North America, Greenland, Europe, Africa, and Asia. In 1748, the Church built the ship Irene to transport its members to America, where its leaders had established a new community in Pennsylvania that they named Bethlehem. The Irene had already made eight trips to Pennsylvania, when Gottlieb Pezold [or Bezold] (1720–1762) gathered a group of 55 unmarried Moravian Brothers for the ship’s ninth voyage. Ollendorf was among them. Given the frequency of travel among the Single Brethren, it is entirely possible that Ollendorf’s voyage on the Irene in 1754 was not his first. The ship’s records are not comprehensive and its rolls seldom noted the crew. The crew lists that do survive (for the first and eighth voyages of the Irene) include Ollendorf’s good friend William Edmonds, who reportedly served as the boat’s cook. Did Ollendorf also serve as a cook on the ship? The voyage that brought him to New York on 16 November 1754 may not have been his first journey to North America, but his last.

Ollendorf lived in the single Brethren’s residence in Bethlehem, leftmost of the first row of buildings at the center of this image, a three-story structure with a mansard roof. Nicolaus Garrison, Jr., View of Bethlehem, one of the Brethren's principal settlements in Pennsylvania, North America 1757.

Ollendorf arrived in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on 24 November 1754 and entered his name on the rolls of single men living in the area. The records of the Moravian Church in Bethlehem indicated that he “went away from the congregation” in May 1758. This appears to be the result of a deliberate choice to leave the Church. An entry in the minutes for the Bethlehem Elders’ Conference on 16 May 1758 suggests that he was offended by some action of the Church: “Ollendorf now wants to move on [German idiom: “move his pole onwards”] and move away from Bethlehem, on our account.” Given the extraordinary caliber of his recipes, perhaps he was upset at not being chosen for the honor of serving as the landlord of the newly built “House of Entertainment,” which in 1762 would be renamed the Sun Inn, still operating today. Ollendorf may have removed to Nazareth, about 10 miles north. He would spend his final days in Forks.

In Pennsylvania, Ollendorf sometimes used the anglicized version of his name, Charles. He made two fast friends. One was William Edmonds (1708–1786), a native of England who had joined the Moravian Church in the early 1740s and settled in Bethlehem in 1749. Like many colonists, Edmonds dabbled in a number of fields. In addition to his stint as a cook on the Irene, he had worked as tanner, ferryman, storekeeper, and Indian agent. He also served in the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1755 and again in 1770-74. When Benjamin Franklin was stationed in Northampton Country in 1756, organizing troops for the French and Indian War, Edmonds was his constant companion. Ollendorf’s other good friend was Hans (or Johann) Melchoir Stecher (1710–1786). After emigrating from the Pfalz to Philadelphia in 1732, Stecher made his way to Forks, Pennsylvania, where he was listed on the tax rolls in 1752. When he died, his 300-acre farm was assessed at a substantial 2,435 pounds. At least four of his seven sons would serve in the American forces during the Revolution, including Melchoir (“George”) Stecher (1737–1808), a lieutenant in the Northampton County militia.

Among Ollendorf’s bequests to the Stecher family were his kitchen utensils (Register of Wills, Northampton Country, PA, vol. 1, pp. 41-42)

No longer cooking professionally, Ollendorf was still a bachelor when he prepared his will on 27 April 1768 and identified himself as a tailor. Naming William Edmonds as his executor, he divided his estate among the Edmonds and Hans Stecher’s children (whom he refers to by their German rather than their English names). To Stophel Stecher, for example, he left his “German Bible & Lutheran Catechism, a hat Brush & hand Brush & my Bedding, sheets, pillows & Cases & Bedstead.” To Ludwig Stecher he left “my Gun & sword with the Cartridges.” To Barbara Stecher he left “my Pots, tea kettle, Cups & Saucers, Cannister[s], & all other Kitchen Furniture & Tea Table furniture.” To William and Margaret Edmonds he left “the sum of three pounds between them in token of their Love & Care with me.” And so on. The rest of his estate he left to Melchoir, who lived on the farm that he built with his father. A diary from Nazareth, Pennsylvania now in the Moravian Archives records Ollendorf’s death:

April 30^th 1786. We also learned this morning through Brother Edmonds that the single Carl Ollendorf, who had gone away from the congregation many years ago, passed away yesterday evening not far from Friedensthal, on [Melchior] Stecher’s plantation.

Melchior added his ownership signature to the manuscript, suggesting that the later recipes in the manuscript (154 to 308) might have been his. But because there are several that are designed to ease the discomforts of pregnancy, it is possible that Hand C might have been one of his wives. He was married twice, first in 1763 to Catarina Schneider (1734–1777), and then in 1778 to Elizabeth Ehret Messinger (1757–1819). Further research into local records might turn up writing samples that will positively identify the author of Hand C.

Melchior Stecher's signature in the margins of this cookbook

Carl Ollendorf and the Prehistory of Pennsylvania Dutch Cookery

As Donna R. Gabaccia and others have noted, the immigrant experience in colonial America brought together a range of regional cuisines and prompted a vigorous exchange of recipes. An estimated 100,000 Germans emigrated to America between 1681 and 1790. By 1790 the “Pennsylvania Dutch” comprised almost 9 percent of the United States population and 33 percent of the population of Pennsylvania. It is no surprise, then, that German recipes should appear in Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery (1796), the first domestically-produced cookbook, nor that so many German favorites should become staples of the American diet.

Most scholarship on colonial cuisine has focused on Anglophone sources. Judging from the entries in the invaluable Manuscript Cookbooks Survey curated by Szilvia Szmuk-Tanenbaum and Stephen Schmidt, the present work is more substantial than the vast majority of surviving English-language culinary manuscripts from colonial America. It is also substantially earlier than other recorded sources for German American cuisine as Friederike Löffler’s Oekonomisches Handbuch für Frauenzimmer (1791) -- a Stuttgart publication that William Woy Weaver notes was widely used in German America -- and Gustav Peters’s Die geschickte Hausfrau (1848), the first German American cookbook.

Carl Ollendorf’s cookbook therefore offers exceptional opportunities for historical research. Indeed, it offers a counterexample to many dominant tropes in food history, which generally have focused on cooking as a female activity and have drawn stark class divisions between elite tastes and folk cookery. Although Ollendorf might once have labored in professional kitchens in Germany, he ended up in a farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania living with a family that used his cookbook and extended it. We expect that a careful comparison of the recipes in this text with those compiled by J. George Frederick in his Bethlehem-centered Pennsylvania Dutch cookbook may prove fruitful and that further scholarship will establish this colonial manuscript as a key source for understanding the evolution of German American cuisine in particular and early American culinary practices more generally.

Exercises by a very young Susanna Stecher (1787–1857) in both German and English adorn the endpapers of the cookbook

Selected References

Camp, Charles. American foodways: what, when, why and how we eat in America. Little Rock, AR: August House, 1989.

DiMeo, Michelle and Sara Pennell, eds. Reading and writing recipe books, 1550–1800. Manchester: University Press, 2018.

Der Hoch-Deutsch-Americanische calender, auf das Jahr . . . 1776. Germantown, PA: Christoph Saur, [1775].

Eger, Susanna. Leipziger Kochbuch [1745]. Munich: Richter, 1983

Franklin, Benjamin. Letter to Timothy Horsfield, 16 January 1756. Founders Online. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-06-02-0145

Frederick, J. George. Pennsylvania Dutch and their cookery: their history, art, accomplishments, also a broad collection of their food recipes. New York: Business Bourse, 1935

Gabaccia, Donna R. We are what we eat: ethnic food and the making of Americans. Cambridge, 1998.

Gloning, Thomas. “Textgebrauch und sprachliche Gestalt älterer Kochrezepte (1350–1800). Ergebnisse und Aufgaben,” in Textarten in deutscher Prosa. Edited by Franz Simmler, 517–550. Bern: Lang, 2002.

Glorez, Andreas. Vollständige Hauß- und Land-Bibliothec: ebenfalls in 4 Theil. Regensburg, 1701.

Jordan, John W. “Moravian immigration to Pennsylvania, 1734 – 1767,” Transactions of the Moravian Historical Society 5 (1899) 51-90

Löffler, Friederike. Oekonomisches Handbuch für Frauenzimmer. Stuttgart: Johnann Christoph Betulius, 1791

Milspaw, Yvonne. Food and cooking. In Joshua R. Brown and Simon J. Bronner, eds., Pennsylvania Germans: An Interpretive Encyclopedia. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017.

Peters, Gustav. Die geschickte Hausfrau.Eine Sammlung Guter Recepte und Anweisungen zum Kochen, Braten, Kuchen-Backen, und Einmachen von Früchten. Harrisburg: Lutz and Scheffer, [1848]

Peucker, Paul. “‘Inspired by flames of love’: homosexuality, mysticism, and Moravian Brothers around 1750.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 15, no. 1 (2006): 30–64.

-----.  A time of sifting: mystical marriage and the crisis of Moravian piety in the eighteenth century. Penn State University Press, 2015

Reichel, William Cornelius. The Old Sun Inn at Bethlehem, Pa, 1758, now the Sun Hotel: an authentic history. Doylestown: W. W. H. Davis, 1873

Rosalia, Eleonora Maria. Freywillig aufgesprungener Granat-Apffel des Christlichen Samariters. Vienna: 1697

Sandwick, Charles M., Jr. “The Edmonds family in Bushkill Township,” The Jacobsburg Record 12/4 (July/August 1984), 5-7.

Schellhammer, Maria Sophia. Das brandenburgische Koch-Buch... Berlin: Johann Andreas Rüdiger, 1723.

Shanahan, Madeline. Manuscript recipe books as archeological objects: text and food in the early modern world. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015.

Simmons, Amelia. American cookery: or the art of dressing viands, fish, poultry, and vegetables, and the best modes of making pastes, puffs, pies, tarts, puddings, custards, and preserves… (Hartford, 1796)

Stecher, Robert M. A Stecher - Stecker saga: the story of several German families and their descendants in America. Cleveland, Ohio : Western Reserve Historical Society, c1977

Szmuk-Tanenbaum, Szilvia and Stephen Schmidt, curators. Manuscript Cookbooks Survey

Tobias, Steven. M. “Early American cookbooks as cultural artifacts,” Papers on Language and Literature, 34(1998): 3-18.

Weaver, William Woy. Sauerkraut Yankees: Pennsylvania Dutch foods & foodways. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press (1983)

-----. Pennsylvania Dutch country cooking. New York: Abbeville Press, 1997

Wiswe, Hans. Kulturgeschichte der Kochkunst. Kochbiicher und rezepten ans zwei Millennia. Munich, 1970.

Yoder, Don. “Historical sources for American traditional cookery: examples from the Pennsylvania German culture,” Pennsylvania Folklife 20 (Spring 1971) 16-29.

We are grateful to Thomas J. McCullough of the Moravian Archives for his careful research and authoritative translations. We have also benefited greatly from the insights generously shared by William Woy Weaver. We claim sole responsibility for any errors of fact or judgment in this description.