"Church Potluck Dinners"

There’s a special place in heaven for ladies who love to cook and share their culinary talents at church potluck dinners. Sure, church people volunteer in a thousand different ways. They clean and polish, teach Sunday school, baby sit small children during the service, usher in the sanctuary, visit the elderly and sick, and sing in the choirs. They volunteer to insert and fold the bulletins and collate and staple the monthly newsletters. Without all the help from these devoted members, your church and mine could not celebrate the Word.

But it’s the cooks who make the potlucks and other dinners the special epicurean attractions they truly are. It was with delight that I looked through one of the Library’s newest cookbooks, The Church Ladies’ Celestial Suppers & Sensible Advice by Brenda Rhodes Miller. While this cookbook has a decidedly Southern flavor, there are many mouth-watering recipes that caused me to reminisce about my early church experiences.

Without question, it was the food that attracted and, later, kept me returning to church. I can vividly remember my first church potluck in the basement of the white framed building I attended in a small dust-covered town in southern Idaho.

I was probably 12-years old and was attending the meal courtesy of my best friend and classmate. His parents were members of the church, I was not. My parents weren’t church people but I often went to church and Sunday school with my friend and his parents. My parents were okay with that; my mother thought it might “civilize” me.

As a farm boy who lived with his parents on a small potato farm about a mile southeast of town, I was used to eating whatever my mother had available and had the energy to make after helping my father with his chores and other farm work. Our meals had little variety. Generally, I could count on either a freshly butchered chicken or pan-fried round steak that had been vigorously pounded flat and then liberally floured. Lumpy milk gravy from the “drippings” was always a staple along with our own farm-grown “Russet” potatoes. Before we prospered enough to have a deep freezer, our only “fresh” vegetables in the winter were carrots as they could be stored in the cellar for about as long as the potatoes. By spring, both the potatoes and carrots had a lot of brown and black spots that had to cut away before cooking.

You can imagine my astonishment at the variety of flavors, colors and textures of the dishes at the first church potluck I attended. I’ll never forget returning home that Sunday afternoon and regaling my mother with descriptions of the different foods I had tasted. I really do believe that the meals served in our home changed for the better from that day forward as my mother realized that her boy had “seen Paree”.

I wish I could thank the wonderful church women in that little town in Idaho who prepared the feasts that I enjoyed nearly 50 years ago. I do want all of you ladies who continue the church potluck tradition to know that you are undoubtedly influencing many young people who, because of your delicious food, dutifully attend the church socials with their parents.