Adam Estilette – The Cajun Farmer Behind Frank’s Red Hot Sauce

I agree with Ethel, the sweet grandma with the spicy saying on Frank’s Red Hot commercials who proclaims, “I put that shit on everything!”    I agree not only because I’m a loyal Nati products guy, but I think it’s a great universal hot sauce.   It’s not too sweet, not too spicy, and super tangy.   It’s the key ingredient in the 1964-created Buffalo Wings at Teresa Bellisimo’s Anchor Grill.   And, although it’s named after Jacob Frank, the owner of the Cincinnati-based Frank Tea & Spice Company, we can thank a modest Cajun farmer from New Iberia, Louisiana, Adam Estilette, for the amazing recipe.    It’s too common that the actual inventor of a food product is buried in corporate history.   I’m here to give credit where credit is due.     And that credit comes largely from a phone interview I was super lucky to have lined up last week with the inventor’s great grandson, Jerome. Two exhibits at the Cincinnati Museum Center – Jewish Cincinnati and Made in Cincinnati feature Frank’s Red Hot Sauce, but neither mentioned the involvement of Estilette.

Adam Estilette, creator of Frank’s Red Hot Sauce Recipe.

Constance Estilette, Adam’s Wife might have lent a hand to the formation of the Frank’s Red Hot Sauce recipe.

Adam (pronounced A-DAMN) Estilette was from a modest Cajun farming and trapping family in New Iberia, Louisiana, in what is known as the Bayou Teche, about a two hour drive down I-10 from New Orleans.  It’s largely made up of Cajuns – descendants of the Acadian French Catholics who were forced out of Canada by the British after the War of 1812 and migrated to Louisiana.    Don’t confuse the Cajuns with the Creoles of New Orleans.    Jerome tells me a Cajun gumbo has no tomatoes – it’s made up of a dark flour-based roux, and never mixes seafood with meat, it’s either one or the other.   A creole gumbo has a tomato base.   Both use peppers and hot sauce to amp up the heat.

The area has an Old World Catholic devotion and a truly unique American-French-Acadian culture.      They have a very cool Eucharistic boat procession in mid August for the Feast of the Assumption of Mary called the Fete Dieu du Teche.    A boat carrying the Holy Eucharist in a monstrance (a gold, highly decorated holder) and another carrying an antique statue of Virgin Mary rides down the Bayou teche, stopping at five churches in the area.     Faithful follow in their own decorated boats and stop for benediction and prayers at each port along the bayou and end with a large procession and lots of good Cajun food.  At each port, young girls in First Communion like ‘wedding dresses’ and veils meet the Eucharist and Statue of Mary.   Pere Noel brings the gifts to children at Christmas, and he is said to bring them on a canoe led by alligators down the bayou.   And, they all have a great potwah French accent.   In addition to the dark brown roux gumbo, they love a good redfish or striped bass courtbouillon, which is a spicy tomato based stew, boudin balls (like our goetta balls), and pig roasts.

The Cajuns of Acadiana also celebrate Mardi Gras in a very different way from New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama. They dress up in very specific costumes with masks and pointed hats, drinking, going from door to door asking for ingredients for the big communal gumbo, which culminates in a group race to catch a live greased chicken which will be the protein in said gumbo. One of Anthony Bourdain’s last episodes was a view into this Cajun Courir de Gras.

A costume worn by those in Cajun Acadiana for the Courir de Gras on display at the Bayou Teche Museum in New Iberia, Louisiana.

Adam’s family were French speaking, but landed in New Orleans in the early 1720s from the Bas Rhine region of Germany close to French speaking Alsace.   So they preceded the descendants of the Acadian French by nearly a century.    Johann George Stieglieder (the Germanic version of their name) landed with his wife.   They quickly moved out of New Orleans to the parishes surrounding Lafayette which became hot pepper country.   They Frenchified their last name to E’stilette, and five generations of the Estilettes farmed and hunted around the bayou.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, New Iberia was the American capital of hot sauce.     The king of hot sauces, the large McIlhenny’s Tobasco Sauce operations were on the family owned Avery Island just south of New Iberia.     Adam, like other Cajun farmers, grew his own peppers on a small scale.  Knowing there was not way he could compete with the McIlhenny operation, he knew for his own hot sauce, he’d have to use another type of pepper.    He wanted to make it in the Louisiana style, which means the peppers were mashed/chopped up and fermented or ‘brewed’ as the Cajuns call it, dry with salt in oak barrels, just like sauerkraut, and then brewed again with distilled white vinegar.     The high ratio of vinegar to pepper is what makes Louisiana style hot sauce.      So Estilette landed on the cayenne pepper, which makes a delicious sauce.

Left to right James Crutchfield, VP of Frank’s, Frady Estilette, son of Adam, and John Frank, son of Frank’s founder Jacob Frank in the St. Martinsville, Louisiana cayenne pepper fields.

In about 1917 Jacob Frank goes down to the area of New Iberia to scout out pepper farmers and hot sauce to add to his Dove line of shelf sized spices, olives, and Jumbo brand peanut butter.   He knew many thought McIllhenny’s tobasco was too hot, so he knew there was a market for a more flavorful sauce with less heat. He also knew there was a hot sauce market for the African American community now in the north that had come up from the South in the Great Migration.

He meets Adam, loves his sauce and decides to partner up with him to make Frank’s Red Hot Sauce.   He builds Adam a rather large pepper brewing plant on St. Charles Street in New Iberia, and rents him lands in Crowley, Louisiana, about 40 miles west of New Iberia and nearby St. Martinsville.      Conveniently, Adam and his wife and eight children live right across the street from the plant, so he employs most of his children in the operation.   His oldest daughter Magna was the bookkeeper, Frady was a drier, Grady and Amilcar were pepper ‘brewers.’    It was a big operation and Adam also employed others at the plant, and hired workers to tend and harvest the peppers.     Two large open vats held fermenting pepper mash in the floor of the main factory, where workers hand mixed the mash all day with wooden boat oars.

The New Iberia, LA, Frank’s and Estilette Cayenne Pepper Brewing Plant. Bookkeeper Magna Estilette, daughter of Adam holding the ‘books’ at far left.

Frank’s pepper plant with workers.

The first bottle of Frank’s Red Hot sauce came to market in 1920, and can be seen in the original 1922 photograph of the inside of the first Cincinnati Chili parlor, Empress Chili, on the counter.    Franks sold spices and hot sauce to both Skyline and Empress and each ordered in different quantities so that no one would know the sacred ratios of their chili spice blends. Soon other hot sauces in the area were released.   The local Bauman family released, Crystal Hot Sauce, another cayenne-based sauce, in 1923.    In 1929, the local Bruce family of New Iberia, came out with Louisiana Hot Sauce – which doesn’t specify the type of red pepper it uses.   As Frank’s customer based was largely around the Cincinnati-Midwest supply chain, it was largely unknown in Louisiana, and so was not really competition with the other me-too hot sauces popping up around New Iberia.

John Frank, Frady Estillette, and pepper plant workers.

The Estilettes and their factory workers mashed and aged the peppers with salt, then again with vinegar, all in oak barrells.   Then they filtered out the peppers and sent the liquid gold in oak barrels to Cincinnati, where spices were added and they were bottled at the Frank Tea and Spice plant.    The Estilettes kept the concentrated pepper mash, putting it in glass mason jars.  They would use a tablespoon in a pot of gumbo or in other Cajun dishes.   It was so strong it would corrode the metal mason jar lids in only a few months.  But there must be something to be said for capsicum and longevity.   All of Adam’s eight children lived well into their 80s.  His oldest daughter Magna lived to be 103.

The front offices of the New Iberia facility before sale to Durkee and today.

Hot pepper mash barrel scars today testify what was made in the New Iberia Franks hot sauce facility.

Inside the Franks New Iberia plant today

Hot peppers die in the cold winter, so they need to be seeded every year.   And during the dormant winter, after all the peppers had been processed, Jacob Frank sent parsley to the Estilettes, which they dried in the pepper plant.  This was for a government contract that started during World War II.

There were about four different bottle companies who supplied the hot sauce bottles to Franks in Cincinnati. They were Owens- Illinois, Rockaway Glass, and Armstrong Glass.

Jacob Frank was also responsible for bringing the paprika pepper cultivation to America.  Once he had set up Estilette with the cayenne factory for hot sauce, he co-funded a paprika drying plant in nearby Opelousas, Louisiana, in 1940.    Originally Frank had looked at bringing them to New Iberia, but he thought it would be too close to the tobasco and cayenne pepper crops and cause cross pollination, making funky franken-peppers.   Arthur G. Denes, representing both the Frank Spice and Tea Company of Cincinnati and the Woodson Spice Company of Toledo, Ohio, moved to Opelousas with his family and ran the plant pepper drying plant.    Dried paprika spice was in great demand in the U.S. as about 6 million to 8 million pounds were imported annually from Europe.   The business became known as American Paprika Pioneer Mills Inc., later called First American Paprika Mills.

When Adam died in 1961, his sons Frady and Grady took over.   Grady owned a sugar mill in New Iberia and also had a great business in that industry. Grady’s son Felix Francois never came into the business and went off on his own and started the Evangeline Hot Sauce Company, which shortly went bankrupt.     His other son Grady, Jr became a Catholic priest. Evangeline is a character in an old Acadian folk tale who searches far and wide to find her husband during the Acadian migration from Canada to Louisiana.

Vice President James Crutchfield and Jacob Frank’s son, John Frank, who took over as president, would visit the Estilettes a couple times a year and stay at the old Hotel Fredrick in the center of town in New Iberia. The Estilettes would put up a large dinner of gumbo, fish courtbouillon, roast a whole pig or serve large Fred Flintstone sized steaks for the visiting party, spiced up with their filtered pepper mash from the brewing of the hot sauce.  John Frank Jr. so loved Grady’s wife Eulah’s cooking that he got her and the family to cook some cajun food – etouffee, gumbo, etc – in great quantities and had it shipped to New York City for the National Spice Associations’s annual meeting.

As Frady got older, transferred the running of the plant to his relative, Raymond Babac,  who with his wife Eulah, ran the plant until the Frank’s sold the operation to a group of investors in 1969, who changed the name to Frank Foods. They in turn sold it in about 1974 to Durkee Foods who renamed Frank’s Hot Sauce to Durkee’s Hot sauce. But it was changed back to Frank’s when Durkee sold to McCormick’s.

Jerome and the Frank descendants still own a few acres of land together on Cypress Island.  They had bought it as an investment, thinking it would be a good place for pepper cultivation.   But the majority of pepper growing moved south into South America.     Maybe it would be a good place for a Frank’s Red Hot Museum.

The Estilette family house across from the factory burned down about five years ago, but the original Frank’s / Estilette factory building still stands, set to become a sugar cane museum.

Today Frank’s is one of the top selling and most popular hot sauces in America, all because of a little known Catholic Cajun and a Cincinnati Jewish collaboration.

10 East Side Dishes Gone But Not Forgotten

Jim Borgmann’s famous East Meets West cartoon of Cincinnatians.

The East Side of Cincinnati has just as many beloved restaurants and signature dishes as the West Side that are gone but not forgotten.    And, much as East Siders of today would like the world to think there isn’t as rich a history of dives to the east of Vine Street,  it’s just not true.   And, there is just as much culinary innovation and sophistication on the West Side as there is on the East Side.    Throw those old stereotypes out the window!

Thankfully the East Side still has some classics.   There are the Zip Burger and its yummy chili.  There’s the Quatman Burger special.    Who doesn’t like throwing back some fried mushrooms at Salem Gardens.   There’s the simple Stanley sandwich, on the menu at Stanley’s Pub in Tusculum since 1935 – a heaping half pound of grilled or cold ham on rye bread.   You have maybe the original Cincinnati Pad Thai at Bankock Bistro in Hyde Park East.     You also have the amazing goetta breakfast plates served at the Echo near Hyde Park Square.      We have the house made meatballs from Ramundo’s Pizza on Mt. Lookout Square.    And finally, there’s the decadent, cheesy, gooey Crab and Artichoke Croissant at Carl’s Deli in Hyde Park.

One of the first dishes I miss from my early move to the East Side is the fried chicken gizzards they used to serve at the Hitching Post on Kellogg Avenue.     I was actually introduced to them by an out of towner.   They were fresh, perfectly fried so that you got the organy chewiness inside and the right amount of crispy outside.   They were kind of like fried oysters.    And, dunk them in any spicy dippin sauce or tarter sauce and they were the most heavenly comfort food.    I gave them up in favor of my heart muscle.

I miss the ribs from BBQ Review that used to be on Madison Road in Oakley next to the Madison Bowl.   They also crafted some yummy cobblers.       They gave Eli’s BBQ a run for their money but the owner’s desire to retire won.

The notoriously haunted Habits Café on Oakley square was famous for their Potato Rags.   They were crisp golden hash browned potatoes covered with bacon, onions, tomatoes, cheddar, mozz AND provolone, and of course Ranch Dressing.      It was a pure hangover cure.

There were the stuffed pasta shells and other great pasta dishes served at Pasta al Dente in Hyde Park East before they closed.     Prices were low and the portions were huge – like enough for three meals.

Until the fire that shut down the Pleasant Ridge Irish pub Molly Mallones, their shepherd pie filled many stomachs heartily for decades.   It was a true shepherds pie with lamb, veg and charred mash on top.

Keystone Grill in Hyde Park East resurrected another hangover cure dish from a now demolished campus bar at UC between Calhoun and McMillen.   The dish was called the Inn the Woods Potato Crisp and like the Potato rags at Habits, it was an ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ on top of fried potatoes dish.

Many East Siders and Madeirites loved JK Chili Parlor in downtown Madeira.   The chili had a lighter brown color than most Cincy style chilis, and a milder flavor, but also had a cult following.

The famous local double decker called the Hippo was created in Deer Park in the 1940s by Harry Sarros at the Marathon Inn on Montgomery Avenue.   It’s a heaping pile of turkey and ham with choice of adding cheese tomato and mayo.   It was so popular that it spread to other legacy chili parlors, like Price Hill Chili.

The genius Indian-Tunisian fusian restaurant which was the brainchild of Alex Mchaikhl date importer  Cumin had some amazeballs Samosas and spicy chutneys. 

Finally, but not least are the chewy sourdough crust gourmet pizzas and decadent desserts from ZZ’s Pizza on Gilbert Avenue in Walnut Hills.    Life and business partners Bill Enz and Thomas Rehme were ahead of their time when in 1986 when they opened their gourmet pizza shop in a quirky Victorian Flat Iron in a struggling neighborhood.      This was in a pizza town dominated by LaRosa and Pasquale’s before Dewey’s ushered in the gourmet pizza trend.    They had a prima vera pizza – artichoke hearts, olives, peppers, mushrooms over tomato sauce and a blanked of provolone and mozz, a white sauce seafood, a spicy cajun, and  a four cheese with mozz, gouda, gruyere and romano.      Enz won the sweet teeth of his customers with his famous Banana Cream pie and chocolate cheesecake.

There are many more dishes gone but not forgotten in the collective memory of East Siders, but these are the ones that delight my memories.

German-Cincinnatians LOVE Stinky Food

Cincinnati Germania’s “Big Stinky”, a Limburger and red onion sandiwch on German rye.

Korean restaurants, with their stinky kimchee have taken foothold in Cincinnati, a city made up of largely Germanic immigrant families.    That’s because Germans have long enjoyed stinky things.     Take the resurgence of makers non-pasteurized, fermented craft sauerkraut.   If you’ve ever been in the fermenting room at the basement of the Pickled Pig in Walnut Hills, you know what good sauerkraut stinks like.   It’s the smell of healthy bacteria that will nestle snugly in your gut and help ward of cancer and disease.   There are two other companies that make non-pasteurized naturally fermented krauts – our local Fab Ferments, and Cleveland Kraut.

Then there’s the proliferation of smelly Limburger cheese sandwiches at church festivals, Oktoberfests and other local fests.     Many amp them up with smelly raw onions.   Germania, whose Oktoberfest is coming up in August, calls their Limburger Cheese sandwich appropriately “The Big Stinky.”    It’s a heaping pile of Limburger Cheese and red onions on rye.    You’ll also find Limburger cheese sandwiches at Donauschwaben’s and Zinzinnati Oktoberfest, and many others around town.    It’s Cincinnati’s durian fruit – which smells funky, but tastes delicious.

Germanic Cincinnatians have  been enjoying our smelly foods for over 150 years.   An interesting account in the regimental history of the  Civil War local Ohio 9^th German Regiment details confederate guerillas who stole their provisions cart in August of 1862 as they travelled between Corinth and Tuscumbia, Alabama prior to the Battle of Perryville.     The southern mauraders took everything, but left the smelly Limburger cheese.     It’s maybe a statement like the famous line in the Godfather, “take the hardtack, leave the Limburger cheese.”    Luckily the ninth were able to restock their supply of Limburger cheese after Perryville, and always had access to smelly fermented kraut.

Back in the 1890s, importing European Limburger cheese was problematic – it often spoiled in transport, without commercial refrigeration.   But in 1891, a Swiss immigrant named Emil Frey, working for the Monroe Cheese Company in New York, invented a domestic, and milder version of Limburger cheese, or what the Germanic immigrants in the Hudson Valley called Bismark Schlosskase.     Frey’s father had been a dairy farmer and cheese maker in Switzerland.

It used a slightly different bacterial culture for smear ripening than Limburger, which made it easily spreadable, with the same dirty gym socks smell.   It is a cow’s milk cheese, with an edible pale yellow-orange tan crust, and a semisoft, pale interior distinct aroma that can turn unpleasantly ammonia-like if aged incorrectly.     Think of Liederkranz as the Germanic version of Philly Cream Cheese, only smellier.

Liederkranz offered a domestic, creamy pungent cheese that scratched the itch for Limburger and other smelly Germanic cheeses.   Germanic immigrants were delighted.  Adolph Tode, the owner of the Monroe Cheese company and a New York deli, test marketed the new cheese with his friends at the New York Liederkranz, or German singing society, and they literally sang its praises.   And, so as the legend goes, the company decided to name the cheese after the society.

Liederkranz cheese was on the menu of many Cincinnati restaurants from the 1920s until it came out of fashion by the end of the 1950s.

Ludlow Kentucky Veterans sponsored their annual Ludlow Limburger Festival at the end of July, which featured their Limburger sandwich.

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My suggestion for the next big German-Cincinnatian festival food is Limburger-Goetta Kasespaetzle or Limburger mac n cheese.          

The Original Volga German Hot Pocket – A Symbol of Russian Imperialism, American Xenophobia, and Immigrant Perseverance

In two weeks, Rhinegeist Brewery is doing a pop-up for Piroshky Piroshky, a meat pie company out of Seattle, Washington.     It’s a second infiltration of Volga German food – or more accurately – Germans from former Russian Empire – into our local Germanic foodway in the last several years.  We had a similar invasion from the Czech-Tex Bohemian immigrants from Texas a few years ago when UDF trialed their savory sausage filled breakfast kolache called the koblaznick.    Both are filled sweet yeast dough, similar to what we would call a Danish.   It was good but it didn’t last.   UDF decided to make its own donuts and pastries at a factory in Blue Ash (of which I had a hand in), so all their secondary vendors, including Busken were sacked.   My favorite coffee shop in Madisonville, Mad Llama, made a savory sausage kolache that was excellent a few years ago, but they lost their baker during the pandemic and no longer make them.   

The Piroshky meat pie that Rhinegeist is promoting in this pop-up is the great grandfather of a Volga German meat pie or hot pocket called the Bierock that’s popular in the Great Plains states of Colorado, North and South Dakota, Kansas and Nebraska, although it takes different forms and different names in each state.     It comes to us as another immigrant group of Germanic speaking peoples generally called Germans from Russia, or more accurately Volga Germans.   There were other groups of Germans who migrated to other areas of the former Russian Empire other than the Volga River region and at different times.

Beginning in 1763.  Catherine the Great recruited Germanic people to move to the area around the Volga River in what is now Ukraine.      Catherine II, a former German princess of the principality of Anhalt-Zerbst, was Empress of Russia. The Czarina found herself in possession of large tracts of virgin land along the lower course of the Volga River in Russia. Catherine was determined to turn this region into productive, agricultural land as well as to populate the area as a protective barrier against the nomadic Asiatic tribes who inhabited the region.   Unfortunately these Volga Germans would be used again as a human shield by the Nazi regime as they were forcibly resettled along the German border as a buffer with Russia.

They were allowed to keep their German culture, language, traditions and churches (Lutheran, Reformed, Catholics, Moravians and Mennonites.)   What was even more enticing to the anti-war Mennonites was that they wouldn’t have to fight in the Russian army (and by leaving Germany, their army either).       They were given free land and tax breaks to own their own land, allowed to have their own self government in their segregated communities.   All looked bright… for a while.

They lived and thrived on their new land, and adapted the local meat filled Russian Piroshky into the Bierock or the Runza, depending on what area in Germany the immigrants had come.    They filled it with the Holy Trinity – ground beef, chopped onions and cabbage.   Bierocks spread throughout Southeastern Europe as a popular choice for working families.   It was a portable convenience food that could be carried to the field for a cheap filling mid day gnosh.    And thus the German hot pocket was born.

The Piroshky is another name for the Eastern European Pierogi, with which many of us are familiar.  It is a filled pasta dough, and not a filled yeast bread dough.   It resembles the Italian ravioli, the Swabian German mahltashen or the Asian dumpling.    Babuschka’s Pierogi’s at Findlay Market offer a Cincinnati Chili pierogi amongst other traditional types.

The bierock represents a fascinating immigrant food that is a result of two local food fusions – from the piroshky, and into American cuisine; and two immigrations – from Germany to Russia, and Russia to America.   It also suffered with its people through numerous waves of persecution, as ethnic Germans in Russia, and later as both ethnic Germans and ethnic Russians in America.   From a sociological aspect it’s journey could be compared to that of another filled pastry, the Jewish knish, which also survived across its immigration to America and suffered persecution in Europe and America with its caretakers, the Jewish people.

Many of these Volga German pioneer farming families settled in either Kansas or Nebraska beginning in the 1870s to work the sugar beet fields, at which point this forerunner of the Hot Pocket met a fork in the road.   But it also spread to nearby Colorado and north to the Dakotas, creating four distinct forms of this Germanic Hot Pocket.

Because of the requirements of the U.S. Homestead Act of 1862, the German-Russians who took up homesteads in the United States were required to live on their 160-acre farms. They could not live in villages or colonies as they had in Russia. Many Volga Germans settled in cities in the Midwest United States, while the Black Sea Germans acquired land and homesteaded in Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas. Others settled in western Canada by purchase and homesteading. The Volga Germans became closely associated with the sugar beet industry in Colorado and western Nebraska, while most Black Sea Germans became wheat growers in the Dakotas and in Canada; some later became orchard and grape growers in California. Today descendants of those early Germans from Russia are now living in Colorado, California, Kansas, Nebraska, Michigan, Illinois, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Washington, as well as Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan in western Canada. Some also emigrated from Russia to South America.

The Kansas crowd kept preparing bierocks as they had for years, the round  form, passing down the recipe and cementing its place in Kansas’ history.   It looks like a hamburger bun, filled with the Holy Trinity of ground beef, cabbage and onions.

In Nebraska, however, the bierock morphed into something called a runza. Runzas have the same ingredients but are usually rectangular and can include extra ingredients like cheese.  The name “Runza” is a nod to the Low German word runsa, referring to a bun or the round shape of a soft belly.   This use of low German is an indication that  they were Volga German migrants from northern Hesse.    In 1949, Sally Brening Everet and her brother Alex Brening opened a food stand in Lincoln, Nebraska, selling runzas. Her family had come to Nebraska from the village of Kutter in Russia. Her son built a second location in 1966, and now there are over 80 locations, similar to our chili parlors. Most are in Nebraksa, but a handful are in Iowa, Kansas, and Colorado.    They sell a variety of runzas, including swiss cheese and mushroom and BLT, all to cater to the tastes of a younger crowd that don’t want just the Holy Trinity stuffed traditional ones.

In Colorado, it’s known as the Krautburger, as in Schwartz’s Krautburger kitchen, a fast food restaurant serving the pockets since 1988 in Greely and Evans Colorado.      That’s more of an Americanized name than anything to give it a recognizable character.    It’s the same thing the Kiradjieffs of Empress chili did to the Greek meat sauce they called Chili con carne in the 1920s, which later became known as Cincinnaty-style chili.

Finally, the fourth form of the Germanic hot pocket in North and South Dakota is called Fleischkuehle or Chebureki.     Fleischkuekle means little meat pie in allemanic German and is typically a deep-fried version like a turnover, not a baked version like a beiroch or runza.   This fourth version was adapted from the Crimean Tatar cheburek from Turkish peoples of the Black Sea area of Ukraine.   Germans who migrated into this Black Sea area came mainly from southwestern and southern German provinces of Württemberg, Baden, the Palatinate, Alsace, Rhine-Hesse and the area of Bavarian Swabia next to Württemberg, who had also migrated to the area of North European area around what is now Danzig, Poland, and were originally Mennonite by religion.   It’s common at main street diners, especially in Mercer County North Dakota and at fraternal organizations around the state. 

Back to the Germans from Russia.   Since the 11th century, German craftsmen, farmers, merchants, and others left their homeland to seek a better future for themselves in other parts of Europe. They emigrated because of poor economic, social, and political conditions, because of political and religious persecution, and because of scarcity of land. Sometimes they were called in by foreign rulers like Catherine the Great to help develop their own lands and were given enticements and privileges; sometimes they were resettled by their own rulers.

The Germans from Russia were  one large group of emigrants who had settled in East Central and Eastern Europe. Very roughly speaking, two of these groups who came to America later were the following:

• Texas-Czech immigrants came in the 17th century to parts of Hungary and other parts of the Balkans, and in Bohemia and Moravia – they brought the sweet kolache and savory koblaznick to America
• Volga Germans immigrants came in the 18th century to the Banat, Galicia, the Bukovina, and the Black Sea region – they brought the Bieroch, Runza, Krautburger, and Flieschkueckle to America

The reason these Volga Germans of Ukraine and the Bohemian/Moravians came to America and brought their hot pocket is for the same reason that Ukraine is fighting its war now – Russian Imperialism.   A century after the first Germans had settled in the Volga region, Russia passed legislation that revoked many of the privileges promised to them by Catherine the Great. Russia became decidedly anti-German.   In 1871, Czar Alexander II revoked the preferential rights and privileges given to the colonist settlers by the manifestos of Catherine II and Alexander I. 

Russia first made changes to the German local government. Then in 1874, a new military law decreed that all male Russian subjects, when they reached the age of 20, were eligible to serve in the military for 6 years. For the German colonists, this law represented a breach of faith.

The Volga German men also had to join in the military and fought in the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-1878. Many of these men died in the war. In the 1880s Russia began a subtle attack on German schools and other German institutions.

When Russia was reducing the privileges granted to the Germans, several nations in the Americas were attempting to attract settlers by offering inducements reminiscent of those of Catherine the Great.

Soon after the military service bill became law, both Protestant and Catholic Volga Germans gathered and chose delegations to journey across the Atlantic to examine settlement conditions in the United States. Volga Germans started arriving in the USA in the mid 1870s. Early destinations were in the heartland of the country around Kansas and later spread west to Washington, Oregon and California and East to Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan and Ohio.       The major concentration of Volga Germans in the American Prairie states of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas forms what I call the Runza Rectangle.  By now you know how I like to use geometry to describe areas of regional foods.

This rise in Russian imperialism that sent these Volga Germans and Czech Germans to America is being repeated today by Putin’s imperialistic invasion of Ukraine – the same region they left.    Fortunately for America, and the world, these immigrants brought their culture to us and gave us a beloved regional immigrant-fusion food.

Unfortunately for the Volga Germans, once in America, they faced two more rounds of discrimination.  Racist backlash against them exhibited the phenomenon of situational Xenophobia that is so prevalent in American conservatism.   They faced the brunt of anti-German sentiment at the beginning of World War I and then anti-Russian communist sentiment during the 1950s.   Anti-German sentiments spurred attacks on Volga Germans during the first half of the twentieth century. Where they had once been viewed as “not-German-enough,” suddenly the Volga Germans found themselves equated with all Germans, despite their history in Russia. The ambiguities of their ethnic origin–were they German? Russian? Something else?–would also cause some Volga Germans to face backlash during the 1950s. No longer equated with the Kaiser or Nazi Germany, some were labeled communists because of their ties to Russia.

Variations in the dough are those that use cream instead of water to make a denser dough.    And,

the standard condiment to use with bierocks or runzas is ketchup and mustard.     Nowadays, outside Runza’s and a few diners and small chains, these hot pockets are mostly relegated to holidays or the occasional church potluck, but bierocks were once a daily staple .   Most bierock-makers stick to the family recipe, in part to honor tradition as nostalgia is a sublime seasoning, but also because making bierocks involves some time and a measure of exactitude, as most bread recipes do.

There’s a great facebook group called Germans From Russia Food and Culture, which has numerous posts discussing bierochs, runzas, and fleischkuechle.

Southwest Ohio’s Premier Potato Salad Competition Comes to Dayton Liederkranz Turners

Baden Germany’s Potato Salad – Bragele – made with roasted potatoes topped with bibeleskase.

If you think you have the best potato salad, you have two weeks to get your potatoes boiled and mixed.    Southwest Ohio’s Premier German Potato Salad Competition Comes to the Germanfest Picnic Saturday, August 13, at 1 PM at the Dayton Liederkranz Turner Hall just east of the Oregon District in the Historic St. Ann’s Hill District.    You must provide one to one and a half pounds of German Potato Salad with the full recipe between 11 AM and 11:30 AM on Saturday at the Liederkranz Clubhouse Great Hall at 1400 East Fifth Street.   Entries will be judged on originality, ease of preparation appearance, consistency and taste.    Interestingly enough there are no guidelines or judging on what makes it “German.”     Overall score ties will be settled by the highest in the originality category and judges opinions are final.  

DLT is one of the last remaining active Turner societies in Ohio and America.    They were founded as a Turner society, in 1853 and were in the same league or Turnbezirk, as Cincinnati’s, founded in 1848 – the first Turner Society in America, an organization fostering physical fitness and open minds.    For many years, Charles Olt, was President of the Dayton Turners and the Olt Brewery in Dayton, which made traditional German beers, so there was always good German beer in the Turnhall.   They’ve morphed from a purely Turner organization, to a Liederkranz or Singing Society in 1890, to now, mostly an eating and drinking organization, hosting Germanic food fests.   They also host a pretty fantastic German Genealogy Group that will also be on hand at the Germanfest picnic to help you find your Germanic Vorfahren.

The Dayton Liederkranz Turner Great Hall, where the Perfect Potato Salad Competition will be held August 13.

Former DLT Chefs, mother and son team, Jacob and Andrea Hellickson hosted the most fantastic German brunches at the Liederkranz Hall pre- COVID, with all varieties of wursts, kuchen, brotchen, fleisch, and three types of homemade sauerkraut.   You even received a complimentary end-of-meal schnapps shot provided by Chef Jakob.    Current chefs carry on their sauerbraten, stuffed cabbage, and schnitzel dinners throughout the year.     As a fan of a good pun, I loved their facebook ad headline “Wiener, Wiener, Schnitzel Dinner.”   Brilliant.

Spread from the DLT German Brunch

Chef Jakob’s three homemade varieties of kraut.

Chef Jakob sharing post dinner shots.

My perfect potato salad, German or otherwise, is made from skin-on red skinned potatoes, is buttermilk tangy, creamy, spicy mustardy ( a little horseradish kick, not hot sauce kick), a bit of dill pickle and fresh dill, maybe a small amount of curry, some crunch given by small chopped celery, and fresh chopped chives.   Chopped bacon is also a welcome ingredient, but not a requirement. That may not be the canned vinegary, tangy German potato salad we all grew up on.    But what really IS German potato salad?

Well, that’s super-subjective, depending on where in Germany your family came, or when they came over.    Is German potato salad vinegary, or mayo-creamy?   My relatives in Baden make a potato salad that tops roasted potatoes with the local bibeleskase (think of a creamy, runny, buttermilky ranch dip made with quark cheese).  They call it Brägele.

Then there’s the more vinegary Swabische Kartoffelsalat – Swabian Potato Salad – which consists of boiled and sliced potatoes, chopped onions, beef broth, white vinegar, oil, mild German mustard, sugar, and black pepper.

My favorite Cincinnati West Side meat market, Langen Meats in White Oak, makes the best (and maybe the only) smoked, pressure cooked potato salad.   When I was doing goetta research for my book on the topic, Joe Langen, the owner, showed me his special equipment that pressure cooks and simultaneously smokes the potatoes he used to make the delicious salad.   It’s not something currently available on the market, so this smoky salad is truly a rare treat, available weekly.

So if you’re interested in what makes German potato salad “German”, or just who makes the best potato salad in Southwest Ohio, be sure not to miss the tastings and announcement of winners on Saturday, August 13. 

Recipes will be shared in a future Dayton Liederkranz Turner Newsletter and may also be included in future revisions of Dayton Liederkranz Turners cookbook.  So, no leaving out an ingredient to safeguard your best recipe! Contestants will be photographed and may be asked to participate in a video interview. Any photos or videos may be used in future postings, emails, etc by Dayton Liederkranz Turner.
 
Email Culinary@DaytonGermanClub.org or call / text 937-985-4853 NO LATER THAN SATURDAY, AUGUST 6 if you would like to participate in the contest.
 
Winner will receive a Dayton Liederkanz Turner Gift Card and bragging rights!