Decades before one could just “google” a recipe or log onto Epicurious.com, there were church cookbooks. They were a regular fundraising effort for many years, enough so that there was an entire publishing niche for the genre – Midwestern companies that specialized in knitting the pages together with that functional black plastic binding. Committees of women convened and planned and collected and then sorted and typed and read for typos. The stiffer paper front cover page usually included a black-and-white photograph of the church. If not, it’s amazing how many amateur artists chose to draw an old wood cook stove for the cover.
Even if Christian denominations couldn’t exactly agree upon whether baptism constituted a full dunking or not (as an infant or an adult) or whether the saved were preordained and what all that meant, each and every denomination seems to have agreed upon the tenet that church women could cook and it was good, yea even fiscally sound, to collect the recipes to support good causes. There’s no hint of gluttony in the usually simple recipes: just good home cooking, a thriftiness, and a hint of what “home economics” classes used to teach.
When I was growing up and learning how to cook, I didn’t have these “spiritual” guides to assist me. I had an old, worldly red-and-white plaid Betty Crocker cookbook as a girl. Later, I went international with Julia Child and circled the globe, it seemed, learning all sorts of exotic dishes. I would have been insufferably snide then had you offered me one of these church cookbooks. My palate was too refined, my skills too sophisticated, to appreciate a cookbook collectively authored by “The Women of Mt. Joy Presbyterian Church” and one that potentially held a recipe with both “jello” and “miniature marshmallows” in the same dish.
I am – I hope – a little wiser with age and I’m happy to collect wisdom however it may arrive, even in booklets bound with black plastic. My favorite church cookbooks were actually used by their owners. Some called-for recipe amounts are amended in pencil, more or less, depending upon the owner’s tastes. Some have a “favorites” table of contents scribbled inside the usually blank front cover with a recipe name and the page conveniently provided. And all have other recipes, in fading newspaper print, that mark pages here and there, throughout the text. An old church bulletin is not unusual either.
Everything old is new again. Here is a recipe for that green bean casserole topped fried onions in a cookbook from the 1970’s. In one from the 1950’s, one woman shares her secret for coleslaw and we remember that cabbage used to come as large light green balls and not pre-chopped and mixed in a colorful – and expensive – sealed plastic bag. Here you learn that mixing softened cream cheese with practically anything can make a dip, every household knew how to make pickles and relish at one time, and how to glaze a ham.
If not within your own family, these old church cookbooks are around if you keep an eye out for them. They will teach you how to cook the basics of the decade in which they were published and underscore how incredibly lazy we’ve become even with our $400 food processors. My thanks to all the women who shared their recipes and published these treasures.
