Westfälischer PfannenpickertWestphalian Yeast Potato Pancakes from a Cast Iron Skillet

STEVE’S SEASONED CLASSICS

Heritage Recipe Series No. 2 — The Iron Pot Kitchen 

Westfälischer Pfannenpickert

Westphalian Yeast Potato Pancakes from a Cast Iron Skillet

The Farmer’s Fuel

If Pfefferpotthast was the feast-day dish of Westphalia — the stew that came out for Sundays and celebrations — then Pickert was the everyday workhorse. It was what a farmer’s wife made at dawn, on a hot iron surface, with ingredients that cost almost nothing: potatoes from the garden, flour from the pantry, a bit of milk, an egg or two, and a pinch of yeast. It was breakfast, lunch, and sometimes dinner. It was the food that got a family through the day.

Pickert is the national dish of the Lippe district in eastern Westphalia, and its name tells you everything you need to know about it. Pickert derives from the Low German pecken — to stick. The batter is sticky. The finished pancake sticks to your ribs. And the tradition stuck to the families who carried it from Germany to Ohio. In the weekly markets of the Lipperland, Pickert is still cooked fresh on iron griddles today, exactly as it has been for centuries.

What separates Pickert from the ordinary potato pancake — the Kartoffelpuffer or Reibekuchen that most Americans associate with German cooking — is the yeast. A standard potato pancake is fried batter. Pickert is a living dough. The yeast transforms it, giving the pancake a slight tang, a lighter texture, and a depth of flavor that no amount of seasoning can replicate. It rises. It develops character. And when it hits a hot cast iron skillet greased with lard, it becomes something no modern brunch menu has managed to improve upon.

Poor Man’s Gold: Potatoes in the German Catholic Settlements

When the German Catholic families arrived in northwestern Ohio in the 1830s and 1840s, the potato was the foundation of survival. The flat, rich farmland of Mercer, Auglaize, and Shelby counties grew potatoes abundantly, and for families starting from nothing — clearing timber, breaking ground, building churches — the potato was the difference between eating and not eating.

Pickert was the dish that turned that abundance into sustenance. Three or four large potatoes, grated fine, stretched with a cup of flour and leavened with a bit of yeast saved from the bread baking, could feed a family of six. Add an egg if the hens were laying. Add raisins if you had them. Cook it on the iron griddle — the same cooking surface that served every other meal — and you had food enough for a morning of work.

The genius of Pickert is its flexibility. Served with Leberwurst — liver sausage, which every German household made at butchering time — it was a savory meal. Served with Rübenkraut (sugar beet syrup), apple butter, or just cinnamon sugar, it was something close to a treat. On fast days, the egg could be omitted and the lard replaced with a bit of oil. The same recipe adapted itself to feast and fast, to prosperity and scarcity, without ever pretending to be something it wasn’t.

Two Kinds of Pickert: The Pan and the Box

Westphalian tradition gives us two forms of Pickert, and both would have been known to the immigrant families. Pfannenpickert is the skillet version — individual pancakes cooked on a hot iron surface, thick and golden, served immediately. This is the version we’re making here, because it is the one that belongs in a cast iron skillet.

Kastenpickert is the loaf version — the same yeast-risen potato batter poured into a greased bread pan (or in the old days, a long iron box called a Kasten) and baked for up to two hours. Once cooled, it was sliced and then fried in butter or lard. Kastenpickert keeps well and was the version a farm wife might prepare on baking day to last the week. It is, in essence, a potato bread.

Both versions were cooked in iron. Both versions fed families for generations. The Pfannenpickert is the more immediate pleasure — hot from the skillet, crisp on the outside, soft and tangy within. It is also the recipe that makes the best case for why cast iron matters. No other cooking surface produces the same crust.

The Recipe

This is Pfannenpickert — the skillet version — as it would have been made in a Westphalian farmhouse kitchen. A No. 8 or No. 9 cast iron skillet is ideal. At SSC, we’d reach for a Favorite Piqua Ware Smiley or a Wagner Sidney-O — both historically appropriate and perfectly sized for the job.

Ingredients (Serves 4)

•         2 pounds russet potatoes, peeled and finely grated

•         1½ cups all-purpose flour

•         ¾ cup whole milk, lukewarm

•         2¼ teaspoons active dry yeast (one standard packet)

•         1 tablespoon sugar

•         2 eggs, beaten

•         1 teaspoon salt

•         ½ cup raisins (optional but traditional)

•         3 tablespoons lard or rendered bacon fat

Method

Activate the yeast. Warm the milk to about 110°F — warm to the touch but not hot. Dissolve the yeast and sugar in the milk and let it sit until foamy, about 10 minutes. This is the step that separates Pickert from every ordinary potato pancake recipe. Without the yeast, you’re just frying potatoes. With it, you’re making something that has fed Westphalian families since before anyone was writing recipes down.

Prepare the potatoes. Peel and finely grate the potatoes. This is the step that takes the most work and the step where shortcuts will ruin the result. Grate them fine — not shredded, grated. Then squeeze out as much liquid as possible using a clean towel or cheesecloth. Wring it hard. Wet potatoes make soggy Pickert. Your great-great-grandmother would have done this by hand over a ceramic grater, and she would have been ruthless about the wringing.

Mix the batter. In a large bowl, combine the grated potatoes, flour, yeast mixture, and beaten eggs. Add the salt and stir until you have a thick, sticky batter. The batter should live up to the name — pecken, to stick. If using raisins, fold them in now.

Let the batter rise. Cover the bowl with a clean towel and set it in a warm spot. Let the batter rise for about 1 hour until visibly puffed and bubbly. This is where the magic happens. The yeast transforms the batter, giving it a slight tang and a lighter body. Do not skip this step and do not rush it.

Heat the skillet. Heat the lard in a cast iron skillet over medium heat until the fat shimmers. Not high heat — Pickert needs time. Too hot and the outside burns before the inside sets. Medium heat, patience, and cast iron. That’s the formula.

Cook the Pickert. Ladle a generous scoop of batter into the hot skillet and spread it into a thick round — about half an inch thick. This is not a crêpe. This is not a thin, lacy potato pancake. Pickert is thick, substantial, and proud of it. Cover with a lid and cook over medium heat until the bottom is deeply golden and the edges begin to set, about 4–5 minutes. Flip carefully — it’s heavy — and cook the other side uncovered until golden. Repeat with remaining batter, adding a bit more lard to the skillet between batches.

Serve immediately. Pickert is best hot from the iron. The traditional Lippe topping is Leberwurst — liver sausage spread right on the hot pancake. If that doesn’t appeal, Rübenkraut (sugar beet syrup) is the classic sweet option, followed by apple butter or cinnamon sugar. In the German Catholic communities of Ohio, apple butter would have been the most common accompaniment — every household put it up in the fall, and it kept all winter.

A Note on the Iron

Pickert exists because of iron cooking surfaces. The original Westphalian Pickertplatte was a flat iron plate set over coals — essentially a cast iron griddle, the ancestor of every flat skillet in the SSC collection. When Wagner Manufacturing in Sidney and the Favorite Stove & Range Company in Piqua began mass-producing skillets in the late 19th century, they were making refined versions of the same tool that Westphalian farm wives had been using for centuries.

The relationship between Pickert and cast iron is not incidental. The heavy, even heat distribution of cast iron is what allows the thick batter to cook through without burning. The seasoned surface is what gives the pancake its golden crust without sticking. A thin modern pan cannot do this. A nonstick pan will not develop the same crust. The cast iron skillet is not a nostalgic choice for Pickert — it is the only correct one.

When you cook Pickert in a vintage Favorite Smiley skillet or a Wagner Sidney-O, you are holding a piece of the same Ohio Foundry Corridor that served the very communities your ancestors helped build. The iron came from the same ground. The food came from the same tradition. At SSC, we think that matters.

Heritage Recipe Series

This is the second entry in the SSC Heritage Recipe Series, connecting the food traditions of Ohio’s German Catholic immigrant communities to the cast iron cookware produced in the Ohio Foundry Corridor.

•         No. 1: Westfälischer Pfefferpotthast — 14th-century pepper beef stew, cooked in a cast iron Dutch oven

•         No. 2: Westfälischer Pfannenpickert — Yeast potato pancakes, cooked on a cast iron skillet (this post)

•         No. 3: Himmel und Erde — “Heaven and Earth,” apples and potatoes with fried onions

•         No. 4: Grünkohl mit Pinkel — Oldenburg-style kale with smoked sausage

•         No. 5: Blindhuhn — “Blind Hen,” a Westphalian one-pot garden stew

Steve’s Seasoned Classics (SSC) is an online museum and educational resource dedicated to the preservation, documentation, and study of pre-1959 American cast iron cookware, with a focus on the foundries of the Ohio Foundry Corridor — Sidney, Piqua, Columbus, Wapakoneta, and Erie. Every piece in the SSC collection is individually cataloged, researched, and documented to museum standards.

Visit us at www.stevesseasonedclassics.com

Westfälischer Pfefferpotthast

STEVE’S SEASONED CLASSICS

Heritage Recipe Series No. 1 

Westfälischer Pfefferpotthast

A Westphalian Pepper Beef Stew from the Cross-Tipped Churches

From Oldenburg to Ohio: The Recipes That Traveled with the Iron

Before the foundries of Sidney and Piqua were pouring molten iron into skillet molds, before Wagner and Favorite built their empires along the Great Miami River, there were German Catholic families arriving in northwestern Ohio with almost nothing. They came from Westphalia and Oldenburg in the 1830s and 1840s — farmers, tradespeople, and the deeply faithful — and they settled the flatlands of Mercer, Auglaize, and Shelby counties. They built churches with cross-tipped steeples that still rise above the cornfields today, in towns like Minster, St. Henry, Coldwater, Fort Recovery, and Maria Stein.

They brought their faith, their language, and their food.

This recipe series at Steve’s Seasoned Classics exists at the intersection of two stories we’ve been telling from the beginning: the story of Ohio’s cast iron foundries and the story of the German Catholic families who settled nearby. The Brandewies, who left Oldenburg in 1833, were part of this migration. The heavy iron cookware these families used — and that the Ohio Foundry Corridor would soon produce in staggering quantities — was not incidental to their cooking. It was essential. The thick-walled Dutch ovens and skillets that companies like Wagner, Favorite, Wapak, and Columbus Hollow Ware would eventually manufacture were direct descendants of the European iron pots these immigrants knew from the old country.

Every recipe in this series is historically grounded in the Westphalian and Oldenburg food traditions that traveled across the Atlantic to Ohio. And every one of them belongs in cast iron.

Pfefferpotthast: The Oldest Dish in Westphalia

Pfefferpotthast — the name comes from Pfeffer (pepper) and Potthast (a piece from the pot) — is the signature dish of Westphalia. It appears in written records as early as 1378, making it one of the oldest documented regional recipes in Germany. When the Peace of Westphalia was signed in 1648, ending the Thirty Years’ War, Pfefferpotthast was reportedly served at the celebration banquet in Münster. This was not peasant food being elevated for the occasion. It was already the region’s most honored dish.

What makes Pfefferpotthast distinctly Westphalian is its thickener. Where French stews use flour roux and English stews reduce their liquids, Westphalian cooks thickened their Potthast with dark bread crumbs — pumpernickel or dense rye. This technique gives the stew a deep, earthy body that flour cannot replicate. It also meant that a farm family could stretch the dish with whatever bread was going stale, making it both a celebration meal and an everyday one depending on the cut of beef and the generosity of the pepper.

The other defining element is the pepper itself. This is not a subtly seasoned dish. Pfefferpotthast is supposed to be bold — coarsely crushed black peppercorns in quantities that would alarm a modern recipe developer. In the medieval and early modern periods, pepper was expensive enough to signal prosperity, and a heavily peppered stew was a statement of means. By the time the Westphalian emigrants were packing their trunks for America, pepper was affordable enough for farm families, but the tradition of a generously peppered pot remained.

The Catholic Calendar and the Kitchen

For the German Catholic families of the cross-tipped churches, the liturgical calendar governed what went into the pot as much as the seasons did. Pfefferpotthast was a feast-day dish — suitable for Sundays after Mass, for the celebrations after baptisms and weddings, for Christmas dinner after Midnight Mass, for Easter after the long Lenten fast. During Advent and Lent, the beef was replaced with root vegetables or omitted entirely, the stew becoming a meatless version built on onions, bread, and broth. On ordinary Fridays, meat was forbidden, so the iron pot held something else — potato soup, bean stew, or the Westphalian Blindhuhn made without the bacon.

This rhythm of feast and fast shaped not just what these families cooked but how they thought about their cookware. A heavy Dutch oven was not a luxury. It was a necessity that served every meal, every day of the liturgical year. The same pot that braised the Pfefferpotthast on Sunday simmered the Friday bean soup. It was seasoned by decades of use, handed from mother to daughter, and valued accordingly.

The Recipe

This is Pfefferpotthast as it would have been prepared by a Westphalian farm family — adapted only slightly for modern measurements. It belongs in a cast iron Dutch oven. At SSC, we would use a vintage Wagner or Favorite dutch oven or deep skillet for this, though any well-seasoned cast iron with a tight-fitting lid will do the job the way it was meant to be done.

Ingredients (Serves 6)

•         2½ pounds beef chuck, cut into 1-inch cubes

•         4 yellow onions, roughly chopped

•         3 tablespoons lard or beef tallow (not butter, not olive oil — this is Westphalian cooking)

•         1 tablespoon whole black peppercorns, coarsely crushed

•         1 teaspoon whole allspice berries, lightly crushed

•         3 bay leaves

•         4 whole cloves

•         2 tablespoons capers, drained (reserve the brine)

•         1 tablespoon caper brine

•         1 cup dark rye or pumpernickel bread crumbs

•         3 cups beef broth or water

•         1 tablespoon lemon juice

•         Salt to taste

•         Fresh parsley for garnish

Method

Brown the beef. Heat the lard in your cast iron Dutch oven over medium-high heat until it shimmers. Working in batches — do not crowd the pot — brown the beef cubes on all sides. This is not optional. The fond that develops on the bottom of the iron is the foundation of the stew’s flavor. Set the browned meat aside.

Cook the onions. Reduce the heat to medium and add the chopped onions. Westphalian Pfefferpotthast uses what seems like an absurd quantity of onions. It is not absurd. The onions melt down over 15 minutes into a sweet, golden mass that becomes the body of the sauce. Stir occasionally and let them do their work.

Toast the spices. Add the crushed peppercorns, allspice, bay leaves, and cloves to the pot. Stir for about a minute until the kitchen smells like something your great-great-grandmother would recognize.

Braise. Return the beef and any accumulated juices to the pot. Add the broth — it should just barely cover the meat. Bring to a gentle simmer, then cover with a tight-fitting lid and reduce the heat to low. Cook for approximately 2 hours, until the beef is fork-tender. In the original farmhouse kitchen, this pot would have been pushed to the cooler side of a wood-fired stove and left alone.

Thicken with bread crumbs. Remove the bay leaves and any visible cloves. Stir in the dark bread crumbs gradually. This is the moment the stew becomes Westphalian. The bread absorbs the braising liquid and creates a thick, dark, earthy sauce unlike anything flour can produce. Let it cook another 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the sauce reaches the consistency you want.

Finish. Stir in the capers, caper brine, and lemon juice. Taste for salt and add more crushed pepper if you have the courage. This stew should be peppery enough to make a point. Garnish with parsley.

Serving

Pfefferpotthast is traditionally served with pumpernickel bread and pickled beets — the dark bread echoing the thickener, the beets providing acid and color. In Ohio, the German families would have served it with whatever bread the local German bakery produced and whatever they had put up from the garden. Boiled potatoes work as well, though they are not strictly traditional.

Serve directly from the Dutch oven at the table. This is farmhouse food. It does not need a serving dish.

A Note on the Iron

The cast iron Dutch ovens produced by Wagner Manufacturing Company in Sidney, Ohio — just 60 miles south of the German Catholic settlements — would have been the exact type of vessel these families used once American-made iron became widely available in the late 19th century. Before that, they cooked in European-style iron pots brought from Germany or purchased from early American foundries. The transition from imported to domestic iron cookware happened within a single generation of settlement, and the Ohio Foundry Corridor that SSC documents was, in a real sense, built to serve communities exactly like the ones the Westphalian immigrants established.

When you cook Pfefferpotthast in a vintage Wagner or Favorite Dutch oven, you are not performing nostalgia. You are using the tool exactly as it was designed to be used, for exactly the kind of cooking it was designed to do.

Heritage Recipe Series

This is the first entry in the SSC Heritage Recipe Series, connecting the food traditions of Ohio’s German Catholic immigrant communities to the cast iron cookware produced in the Ohio Foundry Corridor. Future entries will include:

•         Pickert — Westphalian yeast potato pancakes, cooked on a cast iron griddle or skillet

•         Himmel und Erde — “Heaven and Earth,” apples and potatoes with fried onions

•         Grünkohl mit Pinkel — Oldenburg-style kale with smoked sausage, a winter communal meal

•         Blindhuhn — “Blind Hen,” a Westphalian one-pot garden stew with no poultry in sight

Visit us at www.stevesseasonedclassics.com