No matter how old you get, if you grew up a certain type of Christian, your mouth will still water at the thought of table fellowship – also known as Church Dinners, the Gathering of the Saints, or A Great Way to Brag About Your Cooking Talents Without Actually Saying Anything. You can be at the home strapped into a dribble bib, and “church dinner” will do it for you.
For years, my favorite cookbook (this was pre-Internet, and yes! I am that old) was a mimeographed (told you) booklet held together by red yarn from the Methodists of Carterville, Mo., (and if you click on that last link, that’s the church off to the left), where my Granny Campbell was a member.
Not a one of those recipes worked. You could carefully cut and measure and mix and the end result would always be, at best, “off.”
Lest you think the dish was a figment of some old woman’s imagination, you could then go to one of those church dinners and sample the recipe-owner’s version and realize: She played me.
With all due respect, I believe all those women have gone on to glory, but only because God graded on a curve. I think every last oneof them left out at least one ingredient when they shared recipes. That way, they and only they could make that dish.
But if you could go the source (Mircea Eliade talks about the purity of beginnings), you could eat your way to heaven — or a heart attack. Services would end and we’d file into the basement to an acre of the folding tables on which would rest every known Jell-O mold and fried chicken that had the original bird understood its destiny it would have cut off its own head. (I may be exaggerating on that last one, but not by much.)
And invariably there was Crazy Church Lady who’d wait until you were chewing a bite of her cake before she’d say, ”Guess what’s in there” because it would be something weird like roofing nails and she would be so proud.
However much I arm-wrestle with God, I miss joining brothers and sisters in Christ and filling my paper plate until it bent.
(I also pre-date Chinet).
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