Sei unser Gast: German Influence in North Carolina Cooking in the Piedmont Region

Recipes Resurrected

Vivian Lewis

Spring 2026

Komm, Herr Jesu, sei unser Gast, und segne, was du uns bescheret hast. Amen.

Introduction

Canning, sauerkraut, asparagus, pork, sausage, cinnamon Christmas cookies. See the pattern? Sounds Southern! Or…German? Can they be both?

Each of these items (and more) all come from German immigrants as they moved south and settled in the Piedmont. Recipes for these staples can be found in Appalachian cookbooks over many miles and many years.

Our story resides in western North Carolina in the Appalachians and the Piedmont, but it begins farther north. Immigrants from central Germany seeking economic relief and religious freedom began arriving in Philadelphia ports as early as 1681. Immigrants continued streaming in during the eighteenth century and establishing communities in southeastern Pennsylvania. These centers of culture, or hearths, were densely populated with Moravians, Mennonites, Lutherans, Calvinists, Dunkers, and Amish by the 1740s. As places became increasingly crowded right before the American Revolution, groups moved along established migration paths such as the Great Wagon Road (1720-1770) which starts in Philadelphia, cuts straight across Virginia, then turns south cutting across North Carolina (Figure 1). The main settlements we will be focusing on are near Salem, Salisbury, and Charlotte, but much of the food and culture of other German hearths are very similar across Appalachia and Pennsylvania.

Religion was a significant reason for the settlers’ migration, and remains central to their food and culture. Not least of which were the Moravians, a sect who considers food a significant part of their worship and fellowship. They settled around Winston-Salem in the middle of the eighteenth century where they remain and continue to celebrate significant events and holidays with a Moravian Love Feast.

Food culture historian and educator Lucy Long describes foodways as “all the activities surrounding food, as well as the ways in which people think and talk about food. Includes all the behind-the-scenes activities involved in producing that dish – procurement, preservation, preparation, distribution, consumption, and even cleanup.” German foodways introduced new ingredients, recipes, and processes to existing Appalachian food culture. Pork and sausage, fermentation and canning, and baked goods such as cakes and cookies using wheat flour and molasses are all German in origin. 

Now that we know how the Germans got to Appalachia, we can better understand how their food culture influenced the culinary landscape of North Carolina. I will discuss recipe books, preparation methods, pork and related products, preservation and canning, and sweets and baked goods.

Cookbooks

Books of recipes help to shape a sense of regional cuisine and as a form of documentation. There are two main types of cookbooks I encountered in my review: ethnic cookbooks and community cookbooks. Ethnic cookbooks contain dishes of the region and ethnic group they describe, often adapt recipes to appeal to American audiences, and sometimes have historical anecdotes and context. Community cookbooks are assembled by local organizations, often churches, whose members contribute recipes they like to cook and share, giving an authentic view of what foods people in the region actually made. Because they are intended for use by members of their own community, they often don’t give much history or context. Community cookbooks often mix German and non-German recipes together, presenting them on equal grounding as local favorites, highlighting true enmeshing of German food culture.

One community cookbook from 1984, the Appalachian Heritage Cookbook by the Steelesburg Homemakers Club, blended different elements of homemaking into their cookbook. Each section divider had a different quilting pattern, and the book also includes notes such as cleaning tips and weight loss advice: this emphasizes how all of these activities were performed by the same people. 

Preparation Methods

As German populations and their foodways moved around, so too moved their food preparation methods. This includes preservation, cooking, and preparation techniques. Because travel was difficult in the Appalachian terrain and people had to provide food for themselves, food needed to be preserved to last through the winter. Canning was central to making food last. We will talk more about canning in the next section. 

Local Cherokees’ preservation techniques were significant in southern Appalachian food culture: they taught European settlers drying techniques to make jerky from meat; how to preserve corn; the custom of storing food in gourds and skins; and how maple sugar or syrup can be used as a preservative. 

German frying methods of battering and searing foods were also introduced and caught on with other communities who adapted it to their needs and preferences, such as Cajuns who adapted the method to be spicy. (Note that this is different from deep-frying, which is an African technique.) Germans also introduced sweet and sour sauces such as in cabbage slaw and potato salads. They also are credited with the concept of marinating meat, though this is somewhat contested. Processing meat into sausages is a German technique that was (and still is) extremely popular among Appalachian populations, and we will discuss this more in-depth later on. Sausages, meatloaf, and scrapple (a spiced mush of pork scraps and meal, beloved by the Pennsylvania Dutch and other members of German hearths) are all traditionally German as well. It is not uncommon for Appalachian cookbooks to include upwards of six meatloaf recipes.

Other cooking methods the Germans introduced include using saffron as a spice; making noodles like spaetzle out of flour, water, and egg; and using large copper kettles over outdoor fires to make apple butter and kettle corn. Baking techniques that originated with Germans include: grinding almonds into marzipan for pastries and using buttermilk in baking.

Pork and Ham

Hogs were the main source of meat in Appalachia. They were allowed to roam in the forests, eating oak acorns to their hearts’ content, fattening themselves up. Anyone with at least an acre or two of land would raise hogs for food or money, and the mid-November slaughter was an important component of preparing for winter. Beef was too expensive to raise or purchase, and difficult to preserve, so people would only really have them as beasts of burden; beef in Appalachia only became prominent in the last century or so.

People would eat each part of the hogs, and pork products were eaten pretty much every day, perhaps at each meal. Assorted parts were preserved for use in later recipes, such as ribs, organs, heart, tongue, intestines, stomach, feet, and ears. Meat was salted or smoked for both flavor and preservation. Baked or glazed hams, bacon, and salted meat (also known as fatback) were staple foods. Lard was also used for flavoring. Intestines were used as sausage casings, and grilled bratwurst or kielbasa served potatoes and kraut were a common meal in hearths. Many cookbooks would have a recipe for homemade sausage (Figure 2).

Many pork recipes demonstrate a merging with other food cultures, such as ham served with potatoes or cornbread, two very American foods. Beans, another primary American food that Native peoples introduced to European settlers, also make appearances in dishes alongside German-origin foods. For example, one “Pork n’ Bean with Weiners” recipe from 1986 shows adaptation, even just in the name! The recipe calls for name-brand commercial ingredients, but the concept still stands. Or, Potato-Sausage Soup recipes appear in many cookbooks. One main example of enmeshing food cultures is barbeque. Southern sides like grits and hominy, Black cooks’ tomato-based sauces, and Anglo-American vinegar-based sauces accompanied German sausages for all manner of summer cookouts and holidays.