The first time I ever went to Lancaster County, I wanted to go to Sonic. I know, that sounds absurd, right? Well, it was in the mid-Aughts. Sonic had just made it to the outskirts of the Philadelphia area. I had seen all the commercials and convinced my then-girlfriend, now-wife that we should take a trip on the weekend on a total larf. It was the sort of random flight of fancy someone fresh out of college, fresh in a new job, would have wanted to do when they had some fresh income. Honestly, I’m not sure why she didn’t dump me right there, but she always knew she had something up her sleeve. That something was exploring the corridor within a mile of US 30.
Originally, she spoke of outlet malls, and there are two. Again, when you’re fresh out of college and living at home, you have money to burn. The same can be said when you’re nearly two decades into your career and both you and your partner make good money. Either way though, the outlets are nice, to be honest. It’s good to find stores where they willingly mark down things because it’s factory direct. They weren’t the reason I fell in love with Lancaster County. The little shops selling all kinds of provisions? Places like the Kitchen Kettle Village and the Bird-in-Hand Farmers’ Market? Those were the reasons I fell in love with the area. I am a man who at times thinks with his stomach. It’s not nearly as bad as thinking with one’s sex organ and still worse than thinking with one’s brain, but the thing about eating is you need to do it to survive. I’ve learned to embrace it. There are worse things in the world to love than food anyway.
The magic about Lancaster County is that it’s a culinary scene that is influenced by the people who live within it, as most places are. It’s not trendy; in fact, it’s the complete opposite. The Amish and Mennonites and their neighbors have been living off their farms, preserving their crops, and eating the highest calorie-versions of food they can to replenish what they lost from long, hard days of toiling in the fields. In some ways, the trends in metropoles have moved back towards what these people have been doing for ages. For example, everyone wants to make the best fried chicken sandwich. Folks in Lancaster County have been frying that bird for centuries, even if you’re unlikely to find anyone doing a little boneless piece of thigh or breast to put between two halves of a bun. Nothing is ever a one-to-one comparison.
There’s no shortage of preserved foods, be they pickled vegetables or eggs or fruit boiled and canned into jellies and preserves. They love smoked and cured and dried meats, not just bacon and sausage, but various plays on salami as well as offal turned into things that your forebears ate during the Depression or that high-end chefs and folks like Andrew Zimmern have tried to popularize nowadays: headcheese, souse, livermush. Amish butter is prized almost as highly as what comes from France, and the cheeses are to die for. And then there’s the pretzels. They’re not anything like you find in a bag or a street corner. They’re not Super Pretzels. There’s enough butter in them to take down a Monday-hating orange tabby cat. And almost all of these foods are out for sampling, or at least they were able to be sampled freely before COVID-19 skidded all of society’s questionably hygenic practices to a screeching halt.
The peak of this experience is always the smorgasbord, which is just a fancy name for a buffet. Smorgasbords are the pinnacle of the kind of matronly and oddly pious hospitality that one finds in the area. You see it everywhere, to be honest. For as insular and “backwards” as people tend to picture Amish people (and yes, it’s an unfair stereotype), I’ve found that there are few areas more welcoming to outsiders, even those who live in ways far different than them. In addition to all the different stores one finds in the hubs on the main roads, generally US 30 and PA 340, there are plenty of farms with homemade signs advertising farm fresh eggs or homemade root beer. They want you to see them, even if they are only looking for a transactional experience. That being said, I don’t know of anyone in this more advanced, supposedly more “tolerant” area that invite you all the way up to their door, even if it’s just to purchase something. It’s weird and almost ineffable, but it’s homey.
Anyway, the smorgasbord is just a fancier word for “buffet,” one that originated with the Swedes who were among the first to colonize the Delaware Valley and beyond. The Amish generally claim Germany as their place of ancestry (Pennsylvania “Dutch” is a misnoer, as the word “Dutch” is in this case a corruption of the demonym for Germans in their own tongue, “Deutsch”), but the mark of healthy culture is borrowing terms from others and assimilating. There are a few notable ones in the area. The one most people tend to recommend is Shady Maple, and while that smorgasbord is HUGE and popular, I’ve found the quality of the food is not worth the reputation that it attracts.
Miller’s Smorgasbord, however, is less Old Country Buffet with better cred and more “your grandmom’s cooking, only for everyone.” To me, the Lancaster County experience has to either begin or end with a trip to Miller’s, either for breakfast in the morning or dinner at the end of a day. The staples on the buffet line have not changed in I would assume decades, even if there have been some minor additions and subtractions. You will always find fried chicken with expertly crispy and salty skin (for my money, a better guilty pleasure food than bacon and it’s not even close) and mashed potatoes glistening with butter and brown buttered noodles that seem out of place for how simple they are but you can never get enough and beef burgundy with deep flavors and tender chunks of meat and chicken pot pie which is not at all like the chicken pot pie you are thinking of and shoo-fly pie, a confection that is so impossibly sweet but so impossibly addicting at the same time . You’re going in looking for these things, and every time, it’s as if they’re trying to prove themselves as a restaurant in their first five or so years and not as a landmark that has been open for nearly a century.
A trip to Lancaster County is something you do when you’re searching for comfort, really. Outside of the outlet malls, you’re not really going to find anything on the bleeding edge of cool. It’s something you do when you want to wrap yourself in a warm, gossamer blanket of familiarity. You’ve sampled the jellies at the Jam and Relish Kitchen in Kitchen Kettle Village a million times. You know that the two meat counters at the Bird-in-Hand Farmers’ Market will have the same selection they’ve always had. The buggy routes aren’t changing, and the livestock at the petting zoos is not getting any more exotic. But you keep going back because these people who run the entire affair come from a place of care. They know you’re going to want to come back, so they keep doing what they’re doing with the utmost diligence and craftsmanship so that you don’t have a reason to get tired of the place. You will always feel like you belong there, even if that belonging is purely tied to what they can sell you.
This past weekend, I needed some semblance of comfort. I’m being intentionally vague here so as not to jeopardize anything I might need to not be jeopardized, but I really did not have the best two weeks one could really have in their lives. It’s okay. I’m okay, and I’m safe. Shit happens, and you have to deal with it. But you can deal with it by moping or by making yourself feel more comfortable. My wife suggested we go to Lancaster County. It’s the place you go when you want to feel comfortable, safe, warm, happy.
For me, the idea of retail therapy doesn’t mean buying clothes or electronics, but it lies in finding things that resonate with my culinary happiness. What are things I like to eat? How can I make myself feel satisfied eating something or cooking something? So I went and got myself a pound of Colombian coffee. I bought some dried beef to make creamed chipped beef and some cheddar cheese sausage grillers that my wife and I ate for dinner Sunday night. I got some cheese that I’ll either snack on or use to make macaroni and cheese. I got four little bottles of hot sauce, because I’ve become a Guy Who Likes Hot Sauce. One of those sauces contain some orange pulp. Oranges in hot sauce, an idea so brilliant that I can’t believe it took me until last weekend to see it and realize how much sense it made! I got two jars of preserved fruit, damson plum jam and strawberry preserves. I am still a little kid at heart who eats peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Then we went to Miller’s to cap the day off. I even had a bottle of birch beer with dinner.
Most importantly, for an afternoon into an evening, I felt comfortable again. I felt like the problems I had were far away, even though they had not been resolved. You can scoff at the idea that a puerile desire to eat fucking fast food led to a revelation about myself, but the truth is if I hadn’t pestered my then-girlfriend into taking a trip to a fucking Sonic, I’d have left an entire area of my coping mechanism unexplored.
Perhaps the point of this entry isn’t to act as an unpaid member of the Lancaster County Tourism Board, although I do recommend that if you can make a trip out there, you should, especially if you like things like the food I mentioned, handmade crafts, or even just taking in the farmland scenery. I guess the point is that you should try to find fulfillment anywhere you can, find comfort. Even if it’s just making an entire day out of going to some shitty restaurant you want to blow some money at, it’ll be worth it. Hell, it doesn’t even have to involve buying shit if you don’t want it to be. I like eating, and food costs money, but hey, if you see something that is free that might appeal to you, do it. We all have problems and strife in this world. However, the good thing about all of that is we all can find ways to cope with it too. Sometimes, the best way to do so could be right under your nose in something you never would have thought of without someone nudging you in that direction.