The little provisions the settlers set out with on their journey west was soon gone. “The flour entirely. Very few had laid in any salted meat of any description, the season for venison was gone by. Turkeys scarce, beef and cattle there was none,” remembered Ichabod Nye. He, along with his brother Samuel, migrated to Ohio in 1807, some of the first settlers to make the overland journey into the present-day Midwest. Thousands more frontier families would face the same harsh realities. They made the best of their experience, but more than a few wished they’d never made the journey west.
When Gottfried Duden traveled along the Missouri River in the 1820s, his writings sparked almost mythical interest and inspired a generation of young Germans to travel to Missouri. Unlike white settlers of the American colonies like Ichabod Nye, those who followed in Duden’s footsteps sought refuge, not merely adventure, reinvention, and wealth. Among them were Carl Schurz, who fled political unrest in Germany and settled in St. Louis, where he wrote thought-provoking analysis of slavery and education reform.
The Muench family came to Missouri and advocated for progressive farming practices. The Poeschel and Dierbergs established a hub for wine production, and the Wesselhoefts settled in Gasconade County, Missouri with a focus on viticulture (grapevines) and farming.
The Germans’ experience across the heavy seas, thick woods, and the mighty Mississippi was just as arduous — perhaps more so — than the white frontiersmen. But those German pioneers and families like them, like the Bodes, Seibels, and Noltes, established a tradition of economic, political, and cultural life that seems starkly richer and more diverse than their white frontier counterparts in the region at the time. Perhaps nowhere was this more evident than in the kitchen.
Slavery and social foodways
As early as the 1800s, immigrants were making modest additions to America’s culinary landscape. Chinese salesmen sold rock candies in California, Italians brought new ways to use fruits and vegetables in Washington, D.C., and Mexicans sold tamales as street vendors in the southwest. French influence in New Orleans formed the foundation of Creole food. But these offerings, however tasty, were localized cosmopolitan experiences limited to American coastal cities. But the Germans penetrated deeper into the American mainland and American kitchens.
German families emphasized diverse, sustainable food practices and preservation techniques that spread beyond their own communities through “social foodways,” including slavery.
Families traveling west from Virginia, Kentucky, and into Missouri traded slaves like the extraordinary Clara Brown, who learned cooking techniques from German families that later passed to white frontier families as she and others like her were bought and sold. This culinary knowledge transfer from German families to white frontier families by way of slaves created lasting impacts on Midwestern foodways, with techniques like sauerkraut-making and sausage preparation becoming integral to the broader American culinary landscape. German families, however, quickly established strong opposition to slavery long before the Civil War.
Still, German kitchens in the Ozarks around the 1850s were stocked with German staples like sausages, smoked or pickled meats, sourdough bread, potatoes, cabbage, and sauerkraut. Further, German immigrants went to great lengths to have variety in their diets. Unlike their white frontier neighbors, it was not part of the German culture to eat the same four or five things in heavy rotation. They believed in orchards and kitchen gardens with herbs and seasonings. A German seed catalog from 1850 boasted hundreds of apples, pears, and stone fruit seeds, all cultivated and adapted to the warmer Ozark climate.
The late Dr. Erin McCawley Renn, a leading historian at the Deutschheim State Historic Site in Hermann, Missouri, told historian Sharon McMahon that Germans scoffed at repeatedly planting cash crops like corn and tobacco because they knew it would ruin the soil and make it difficult to feed a family. The German’s cash crop of choice was hardly profitable; it was to “grow 100 heads of cabbage per person and, stored properly as sauerkraut, would last the year.”
“New” food techniques introduced by German families
Other preservation techniques, like smoking, curing, pickling, and fermenting were central to German cuisine, allowing them to preserve foods for long periods with great variety. Among traditional frontier settlers, salt or drying was the preferred or only storage technique, which led to a tough and nearly tasteless diet high in sodium.
Walking along the fields of a German immigrant’s farmstead in and around Warren County from 1840 and on, you’d witness everything from eggplant to radishes to six different kinds of peas, plus pigs and chickens — as many as 56 varieties of foods. Renn noted farms were diversified with wheat, rye, oats, barley, livestock, vineyards, fruit trees, and more wherever the land could support it. Neighboring farmers would share labor and resources, further diversifying German immigrant diets with more nutritious and tasty bounty without the need for slaves.
White frontier families’ diets could be described as “survival-based,” with an emphasis on corn, sometimes converted into hominy or cornbread, and whatever meat could be hunted or fished around the homestead. White frontier farmers generally farmed large areas with less intensive cultivation. As market prices fluctuated, white families were more likely to plant ever-larger plots of more profitable crops to extract as much value as they could each season, eroding the soil and damaging the land. The effects of these techniques exploded a generation later as farms became increasingly mechanized, hastening the Dust Bowl in the 1920s and 30s.
German approaches to kitchen layouts
In the kitchen, early Germans brought a distinctly European design with efficient layouts operating around hearths, ovens, and tools for baking bread, pretzels, and brewing beer.
Brick ovens were common for pastries, showing a stark contrast from American frontier families who relied on open flames and a Dutch oven for most of their cooking in a “one pot” stew or porridge in heavy rotation throughout the year, with minimal or no use of herbs, spices, or seasoning. “German immigrants favored soups for lunch, often starting a pot in the morning to pair with homemade bread as people felt hungry throughout the early afternoon,” said Renn.
When November came and hogs were butchered, Germans introduced new forms of sausage to American cuisine, like mettwurst, made from raw minced pork and seasoned with garlic, and the more commonly known bratwurst, along with Summerwurst developed in Europe that included beef, venison, or pork.
The lasting legacy of German cooking and culinary business in America
German immigrants left an indelible mark on Midwestern food culture that persists today. Their emphasis on food preservation, diverse crop rotation, and sophisticated cooking techniques transformed not just what people ate but also how they thought about food production and preparation. The Germans’ approach improved the health and nourishment of their communities and can still be tasted in modern Midwestern cuisine, from the prevalence of sausage-making to the tradition of home canning and preservation.
Perhaps most significantly, German immigrants demonstrated that frontier life didn’t have to mean sacrificing culinary variety or sophistication. Their successful integration of European agricultural and culinary practices with America’s rich landscape created a sustainable, diverse food culture that would influence generations of Americans through the formation of popular and profitable German breweries, wineries, and orchards into the late 19th and 20th centuries.
