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When World War I broke out in 1914, so did anti-German hysteria. Ohio, once a bilingual state, declared English its official language and banned German language classes in schools before eighth grade. German street names changed. The press renamed sauerkraut “liberty cabbage” and hamburger “liberty steak.” The Espionage Act of 1917 explicitly outlawed interfering with military operations and recruitment and essentially outlawed anything un-American, aka German.
“That was the death blow,” Morgan says. Cincinnati’s German clubs, almost infinite in number, disbanded. Prohibition finished the job. Shifting to near-beer production, Bruckmann Brewery was the only Cincinnati brewery that operated from 1920 to 1933, and only six breweries reopened after states repealed the 18th Amendment. Pitch potatoes did not survive the upheaval.
By the time rosin potatoes made a national splash in the 1950s, most — but not all — Cincinnatians had forgotten pitch potatoes. I found one article, from 1955, in which a Cincinnati journalist connects zeitgeist-y rosin potatoes with “brewery days when kegs were lined with rosin,” and at least one enterprising Cincinnati family continued to make the potatoes at home.
David Hackman, whose father, Arnold, was head brewer at Hudepohl Brewing Company, remembers eating the potatoes, along with steak and corn on the cob, as far back as 1947. He and his father built a brick structure in the backyard so they could melt pitch in a kettle over wood. Hackman eventually upgraded to propane, which provided a heat so intense it scarred a nearby magnolia tree. Still, something got lost in translation. Hackman cooks his potatoes in petroleum-based pitch, a substance that scares away skeptical friends and children. “This is my tar thing,” says Hackman, insisting, “the worst thing to happen is you get black shit between your teeth.”
Hackman, who’s now 84, can claim something that no one else his age in the turpentine belt can: he grew up with pitch potatoes and can trace the dish’s provenance. At least up to a point.
Pitch potatoes were bobbing around so many Cincinnati breweries, it’s not clear where they originated. There’s a single blog post on the internet linking the potatoes back to Germany, but it’s a fuzzy connection at best.
I sent queries to a German-American beer scholar, a German food historian, and the Berlin-based Society for the History of Brewing, a collective of more than 300 members who research and publish German beer histories and maintain an archive and library. None had ever come across pitch potatoes in their research, nor had a beer museum in Thuringia, a region once known for producing exceptional brewers pitch.
There’s perhaps one clue in a 1912 article in Tägliches Cincinnatier Volksblatt. Though the article is written in old German, the words “pitch potatoes” appear in English, as if there’s no direct translation. The piece concerns the visit of Gustav Stresemann from Dresden to Cincinnati. Stresemann would go on to serve as Germany’s chancellor and win the Nobel Peace Prize, but at the time he served as executive director of Germany’s Federation of Industrialists. The son of a beer distributor, Stresemann, who wrote his Ph.D. on beer bottling, wanted to visit a brewery while he was in town, and Windisch-Muhlhauser extended an invitation.
“Yet this was on such short notice that they could not offer pitch potatoes and steak but only bread, sausage, and ham, along with beer. They thought pitch potatoes were a delicious thing they should serve this grand dignitary,” explained Jana Weiss, a beer historian at the University of Münster, who translated the article for me. “They would almost surely have used a German term if there was one.”
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I doubt I’ll ever know for sure, but I believe pitch potatoes originated in Cincinnati breweries, where pitch was abundant and brewers found creative ways to cook with what they had on-site. At some point, J. Marquette Phillips came in contact with the dish, perhaps while traveling through Cincinnati or Pittsburgh, serving with Cincinnati men during World War I, or hobnobbing with Cincinnati snowbirds in Miami. But because his rosin potatoes debuted during World War II, Phillips chose not to disclose their German origins.
There’s the possibility of parallel development, sure — the idea that the potato could have arisen independently in Cincinnati and the South. But I don’t buy it. We know what turpentiners ate. It was recorded and passed down over centuries, and their foodways are alive today in homes like the Copelands’. What’s quite clear is that while the early naval stores industry greedily consumed longleaf pines, German-American breweries were buying Southern-made pitch, feasting on potatoes cooked in it, and sharing it broadly with the public.
The rosin potato is weird. It’s wild. It’s captivating. It’s also a pain in the ass. At both points in history when the rosin (née pitch) potato emerges, it hitches onto bigger cultural phenomena and explodes in popularity, only to recede into obscurity. German-Americans had more potent traditions and symbols. They gave us Budweiser! Phillips thought of himself on a grand scale; after he was ejected from Cuba, he sent a letter to President Kennedy asking to be installed as an ambassador to a small Central or South American nation. Rosin potatoes were a mere side note in a colorful life.
Rosin potatoes never merited serious thought in the South precisely because they did not matter in the culture. They had little commercial value to the AT-FA crowd. Akzo Nobel sold 20,000 pounds of rosin a month to Cracker Barrel, according to Baker, but shipped out millions of pounds more of its rosin-based products to other buyers. Only when the naval stores industry cratered and its real traditions — the songs, camps, catfaces, and stills of the piney woods — started to disappear did folks latch onto rosin potatoes.