I love Lancaster Central Market! It is the place to go for fresh vegetables, fruits, cheese, baked goods, seafood, and meats. And good chance you’ll be buying from the farmer or baker or cheesemaker who grew or produced what you’ll take home.
My first job was working on market. And now I shop there once or twice nearly every week. I go for the food, but I also go for the people and the atmosphere. Recently I asked standholders why they think Lancaster Central Market has operated for so many years and has such staunchly loyal customers today.
“The people who shop here and work here are a community,” they each said, one by one. As Earl Groff, a second-generation standholder, reflected, “Market is not just a place to buy and sell things. It’s a place to visit, to share ideas, to talk about weather—and government!”
Twenty-five years ago, Viv Hunt, another second-generation standholder, began writing down favorite recipes of the food she sold at her stand. She urged other standholders to do the same. Many did not cook from written recipes.
In some cases, they wrote down recipes that until then had been passed along only by watching their mothers and grandmothers prepare them. Other recipes were translated from German to English for the first time. Still other recipes were so familiar and traditional to Lancaster County that standholders weren’t sure they merited recording.
Viv asked us at Good Books to join them in organizing the gathering of the recipes so that the final collection would represent the current flavor of Lancaster Central Market. We asked standholders to submit three categories of recipes for the new book—a food they sell at their stand, or one made with ingredients sold at their stand; a traditional Lancaster County dish, or one from their own tradition, that they particularly enjoy; and then a personal favorite. In so doing we hoped to capture the regional rootings of the Market, as well as its current multi-cultural flavor. That spread was in that book, as it is every Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday on Lancaster Central Market.
Now, 25 years later, the original Central Market Cookbook is out of print. But standholders—and booksellers across the country—heard frequent requests for “that book with those choice recipes!”
This 25th Anniversary edition of the Lancaster Central Market Cookbook contains the best of the recipes from the original book, plus dozens of new recipes from today’s standholders.
This Cookbook represents the work of many: first, the standholders who wrote recipes amid tending their truck farms, baking breads and pastries, butchering, curing, and making salads. Many of the standholders also tested recipes. That step brought questions from some of the best cooks—why test recipes when we know they work? It was not their quality or tastiness that we doubted; it was that we wondered if these people, who cook with as little effort as they breathe, would record all the steps needed for the uninitiated!
The Lancaster Central Market Cookbook: 25th Anniversary Edition has been a cooperative venture from its very beginning. Now that it’s complete, we invite you to join us in Lancaster Central Market’s tradition of good eating.
Phyllis Good