I am not Amish, and I am devastated.

Also, Amish potato salad is a lie.

I’ve been told my entire life that on my mother’s mother’s mother’s side my heritage is Pennsylvania Dutch. I’ve always taken that to mean Amish. Pennsylvania Dutch means Amish, right? Everyone knows that Pennsylvania Dutch means Amish, or at least everyone that knows that the Pennsylvania Dutch aren’t actually Dutch, like from Holland. The name came about because the English speaking population couldn’t differentiate the word Dutch from the word Deutche, which is the German word for German, but I’m sure you knew that, and I bet you thought Pennsylvania Dutch meant Amish too, am I right? Or at least Mennonite, which is just like Amish-light.

The mere mention of Pennsylvania Dutch evokes images of horse-drawn carts and men in plain black suits with broad-brimmed hats. It brings to mind ladies in homemade dresses and bonnets, selling hand-crafted cheeses and pickles and fruit preserves and that wonderful old-fashioned potato salad made from the recipe passed from mother to daughter, generation to generation, from the Old Country.

I’ve been seeing a lot of Amish/Mennonite culture since having moved to Ohio. On our Saturday drives deep into the rural back country we see Amish and Mennonite churches, horse-cart crossing signs, farmers plowing fields with mules, and road-side market stands everywhere. One time I saw a bearded guy in a thrift store in a small town in Indiana. He was wearing a white shirt, vest, and black pants with stove-pipe legs and I thought maybe he was a hipster (I mean, that kind of is the default for quirky-looking bearded guys in the city here) until I saw several more men wandering around the store sporting matching outfits, then it clicked.

On one of our drives out towards the Appalachian foothills of the eastern Ohio River Valley I got hungry, so we stopped at a small market with a deli that offered both regular and Amish potato salad. Now, I need to set up some back story here about my history with potato salad. I am PASSIONATE about potato salad. The only other food that rivals the emotional depth that potato salad evokes in me is squash casserole, and that is another story for another day. I learned how to make potato salad from my mother who learned from her mother – very simply with boiled potatoes, chopped boiled egg, finely diced onion and celery, maybe relish but that’s iffy, lots and lots of mayonnaise, and never EVER mustard. Almost every potato salad I’ve ever had that wasn’t made by either me or a family member has had mustard in it and it’s nigh inedible. So, when I walked into this small market and was given a sample of the Amish potato salad to taste and found that *sound of angels singing on high* it tasted almost exactly like my potato salad, I immediately felt a sense of connection. This Amish potato salad was all up in my personal DNA, flowing through my veins.

I immediately went home and started researching my Pennsylvania Dutch roots, searching for a documentable connection to my Amishness. I went on an ancestry website and started building a family tree that started with my mother’s roots in Indiana and followed my lineage back through generations to Lancaster, PA, and Lancaster, PA is Amish, right? Isn’t that why Lancaster, PA exists? I found generations and generations of German names and surnames, farming families with dozens of children. Oh the thrill of discovery – all of these Amish grandmothers passing along the recipe for their wonderful potato salad until it reached me.

I traced my line, grandmother to grandmother – Hubert to Neier to Figert to my great-great-great-great grandmother, Susanna Neifertin, (have you ever heard a more German list of surnames?) born in 1794, and here’s a really cool fun fact – my grandmother Susanna is buried in the cemetery of the oldest church in Lancaster County, known locally as The Old White Church. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and was founded in 1842 as St. Paul’s Union Church.

A quick Google search gave me some insight into the history of the Union church in relation to the German population of Pennsylvania and across the Midwest. The Old Country ancestors of this group of immigrants were primarily followers of Lutheran theology until Calvin and his cohorts came along and started arguing certain details of Luther’s interpretation of biblical text which then split the church into the Lutheran Church and the Reformed Church of Germany. The members of the two denominations among the New World German communities often opted to join resources and form one congregation that politely agreed to disagree with each other on whatever points of theology that separated them. One thing that the Lutherans and the Calvinists did agree on, however, was that neither of them were Amish. Not even remotely.

I went back through my research, rechecking records. Every church where we have been recorded as being buried, married, or baptized was either Reformed, Lutheran, or Union. I am not Amish. The deliciousness of potatoes, egg, and mayonnaise in Amish potato salad is not imbedded in my DNA. Disappointing, yes, but still, my ancestry is decidedly Pennsylvania Dutch farm stock and they immigrated from the same region of Germany as the Amish and had access to the same Midwestern farm ingredients and probably cooked food very much like the Amish, right? I mean, Unionist potato salad isn’t a thing I’ve ever heard of, but it could be, right? German potato salad is a thing. Maybe Reformed German potato salad is also a thing?

No. No, it isn’t. Also, Amish potato salad isn’t some magical recipe passed down mother to daughter from the Old Country.

Another quick Google search gave me some insight into the history of mayonnaise, without which, potato salad as we know it is not possible. Recipes for mayonnaise first appeared in British and German cookbooks at the end of the 1800’s. I traced my family to Lancaster County to the mid 1700’s, before the invention of mayonnaise. Mayonnaise wasn’t even introduced to the US until the 1920’s and even then was considered a luxury item – the sort of thing a private chef might serve a president (Calvin Coolidge was a fan) – until the Kraft Foods company made it commercially available in the 1930’s. At best, my potato salad recipe is 3^rd generation. Mostly likely, my great grandmother’s first taste of potato salad as I know it came from a batch made by one of her children, possibly my grandmother.

So where did Amish potato salad come from? The very devout Amish eschew modern technology. They don’t drive cars or plow with tractors. Their houses aren’t wired for electricity or plumbed for running water. They make their own candles and clothes and grown their own food. I highly doubt a mass-produced Kraft Foods product is a dietary staple. Also, every recipe I found online for so-called Amish potato salad has mustard in it. What even?

So that’s disheartening. But in my search for a DNA connection to potato salad, I learned something that almost makes up for the disappointment. My family’s religious history centers around congregations that politely agreed to disagree on certain points of theology while worshipping together as a community. Before I was born, there was some diversion from this religious path, but as an adult I’ve found my way back to it as a Unitarian Universalist. The whole agree-to-disagree-while-worshipping-as-a-community thing is just kind of what we do. So in a way, I have come full circle in the search for my family.

And my potato salad is still the bomb.