For anybody eating at one of these events for the first time, I will give the warning that among the potato salad there is much danger. Every Church lady makes very good Potato salad, and they take great pride in it, knowing that theirs is the best. Selecting the wrong P.S. in front of the wrong Church lady will lead to many hard feelings. The safest response when confronting a group of Church ladies watching the p.s is to select perfectly equal amounts of each offering, as the slightest inequality may be percieved as a preference. And for anybody thinking “well I will just skip the p.s. to avoid the problem”. WRONG. You will not be permitted to leave until you have tried at least one.
Sometimes it can get even worse, like when you must select from hundreds of years old p.s. recipies from Germany, Russia, and Norway, and other places, and national pride is hanging on the decisions you make at a seconds notice.
But seriously, I haven’t had a good peach pie in 10 years since I stopped being involved with church.
There’s a screamingly funny explanation in the book of why Methodists and Presbyterians make cakes and brownies and cookies, but the Lutheran Church Ladies all provide “bars” with the after-services coffee.
wolfman makes a very good point. Another treacherous point in the Church Lady buffet line is the deviled eggs. There will be at least three different kinds of deviled eggs. All three must be tried. As wolfman said about the potato salad, no one escapes the deviled egg checkpoint either.
OpalCat according to Ukelele Ike Lutheran Ladies hang out at “bars.”
Seriously, if you are jonesing for some authentic Church Lady type food, I’d recommend scouting around for a bake sale or two. Baptist and Methodist Church Ladies seem especially fond of bake sales. Episcopal Church Ladies tend toward bridge benefits and bazaars (heh. almost typed bizarre, which would also be right.), both of which will get ya some Church Lady goodies also.
As to how to score some Church Lady Haute Cuisine, well, ya just about have to show up at church or attend a funeral followed by a Church Lady lunch, I guess. Or, maybe you can find a good Church Lady cookbook at a second hand bookstore and whip up your own Church Lady classics.
We most recently scored Church Lady eats at a Lutheran School open house. We’re not Lutheran (or anything else, for that matter) but the school looked good for Littlepotomus… and the eatin’ was fiiiiine…
Next week we’re going to be wooed by Methodists… the school with the best cookies wins!
There was a Greek Orthodox church in Lansing Michigan that held an annual bakesale and lunch fundraiser(crafts too). Talk about good pastry! The first time I went to the bakesale I bought two large plates of goodies, one for today and one for tomorrow. I polished off today’s and then I heard tomorrow’s plate calling my name. I figured I could get away with nibbling just a little corner off of one piece of baklava. You get the picture, I ate it all in one day.
For wonderful homestyle Mexican food there’s a Catholic church here in Topeka, Our Lady of Guadalupe, that holds an annual fiesta and carnival. The biggest feature is the food. People from all over town stand in long lines for real enchiladas, tamales, tacos, and so forth. The money supports their school, and they make, so I am told, a third of the school budget from this affair.
And the little old German church ladies at Sacred Heart make the best Octoberfest food.
Catholic church lady cooking is the best, because you get lots of Polish and Italian food. And all the special non-meat Lenten dishes, a lot of seafood then.
Pierogies are a staple. Soooo good.
We had an old cookbook that our church did the one year. I don’t know if we still have it. There were a lot of good looking recipes.
Another great source of down home good eating is the local volunteer fire hall. I’ve got a possel of recipies saved from years of pot luck suppers, bake sales, and public feeds. Some fire departments raise money by putting contributed recipies together and selling them.
Hi, my name is DeVena, and I’m, ahem, a churchlady (kinda*). But I have the secrets to prove it.
all good casserole recipes MUST have a can of cream of something soup in them.
all good desserts start with a cake mix.
For example,
Take a cake mix (your choice), 4 eggs, 1 cup water (or juice of choice), 3/4 cup oil, and mix it together. Before dumping batter into a bundt pan, mix in one can of icing (your choice) - bake a 350 degrees F for about an hour.
I’ve been making this cake since I was tall enough to reach the oven. I like yellow mix, water (with a little butter/nut flavoring), and coconut pecan icing. YUM!
I also collect recipes…
Raised Southern Baptist but have severe issues about that “submitting graciously” crap they’ve come up with.
oh dear god in heaven, never come to my parents’ church.
there is a lovely lady who is in her 70s, and almost blind.
she insists on making sandwiches for every function, but often cannot read the labels on her canned goods.
she must have no sense of smell or touch either.
nothing else can explain mars bar and anchovy sandwiches.
or spam and spaghetti hoops.
need i go on?
the worst thing is that they always hide hers amongst the normal ones. and they look fine until you bite into them.
all over the church hall you can see people gingerly lifting the top slice of bread to inspect the contents, and often placing said sandwich in a nearby flowerpot or waste bin.
Aaah, the joys of church lady cooking. Another good place to find it is at family reunions, especially if you were raised Baptist and have a lot of older relatives. Of course, in addition to the deviled egg and potato salad checkpoints, you have to contend with the 12 platters of fried chicken, all of which are made with slightly different recipes and techniques, by elderly relatives who hover at your elbow.
The conversations about your name, who’s kid you are, and how they haven’t seen you since you were this big are only a ruse. They just want to cover up how closely they’re watching and cataloging your fried chicken, potato salad, and baked bean choices. Really, it’s far easier to claim you’re not hungry and just let one of them fix you a plate.
At my unc’s funeral we had the Jell-O salad with shredded carrots, the Jell-O salad with miniature marshmallows, and the Jell-O salad with mandarin oranges. Those were on the first table, with the egg salad sandwiches, bologna salad sandwiches, and deviled ham salad sandwiches.
Then there was table number 2, but let’s not get into that…
Back in high school, I was in a five-week summer program between my junior and senior years. (GSP, for all you Kentuckians.) Three weeks in, the leader of one of my seminars had us all get up on Sunday morning and go to a black church. (The idea was for the mostly white group to understand how it feels to be in the minority.)
The service was OK–the music wasn’t quite what I had hoped for, but then my expectations were high. We were on our way out the door when one of the ladies stopped us and said, “Y’all are staying for lunch, aren’t you?”
“Yes. Yes we are.”
We were led down to the basement of the church, where we gazed upon one of the finest spreads of deep-fried goodness I have ever been privvy to. For three weeks, we had been living on the Centre College cafeteria food–not bad, but certainly repetitve, and broken up only by the occasional trek to Dairy Queen. And suddenly, we were in the presence of great mounds of chicken and catfish deep fried in love and lard, vegetables cooked by people who have never heard the word “cholesterol”, huge mounds of homemade rolls and loaves of cornbread…many of us dropped to our knees at the sight of it all. (“If you’re trying to win converts,” I said, “you’ve got the right idea.”)
We made such swine of ourselves that very few of us even looked at the dessert table. There was just too much to get through before that. We thanked them profusely and stumbled back to our rooms, where I then slept for the next eight hours. I was a happy son of a bitch.
My own church back home had its moments, but our potlucks were too often based around store-bought chicken, since most of its members were too profoundly depressed to go to any trouble over food. (And these people call themselves Southern Baptists.) The one exception was my Sunday School teacher, who never forgot the true meaning of Church Lady Cooking; I remember these salmon patties that she made that were pure ambrosia. I asked Mom (at about age 11) why Willie Lee’s salmon patties were so good (the subtext being, “Why are they so much better than yours?”), and she said, “Because she cooks them in lard, that’s why.” It was my first lesson in serious cooking.
When I was little, I thought I would be a church lady.
Sure, I was going to have my high powered (yet not very well defined) career, but I was also going to be in “Covenant Women” and do the bake sales, and picnics, and casseroles whenever anyone was ill. (That’s what happens when someone is sick. casseroles miraculously appear.) That’s just the way it worked.
And I did grow up, but I’m in a new church - and I haven’t seen any signs of church lady behavior, despite it being Presbyterian. Oh well.
