My friend Betty Love likes to say the church taught her to love the Lord and the church potluck taught her to respect a perfectly shaped gelatin mold. (Our neighbor Charlotte insists it’s called “Add a Dish,” but she’s from a really small town Betty Love and I have never heard of.)
As a teenager, Betty Love was charged with helping her mother prepare food for the monthly church potluck. Her father was head deacon, so they were expected to do more than chop up a head of iceberg and call it a salad. And her mother said it would be “sinful” to pick up a couple of pies at the Piggy Wiggly and pretend they had baked them.
“Get it?” she would ask Betty Love, smiling. “Sinful!”
“I spent more hours than I can remember,” says Betty Love, “helping my parents haul tuna noodle casseroles, fruit salads with and without poppy seed dressing on account of Mrs. Miles and her finicky dentures, and carrot cakes with half-inch-thick cream cheese icing to the fellowship hall of the First Millerville Anointed Redeemer Church.
“There I’d be,” she says, “in the back seat of the station wagon, balancing this concoction or that in my lap while Daddy kept eyeing me in the rearview mirror, checking to see if anything had tipped over and if I had thought to bring a dish towel just in case. I never spilled a drop, because Daddy always drove about fifteen miles an hour and kept his hands at ten and two.”
Sometimes Betty Love pauses about now to take a breath before continuing. “The worst was when Mother decided to take more food than usual, and I was forced to steady a pan on the floor between my penny loafers and keep my little brother from swiping his index finger through the icing for a lick. Every month, just as we were pulling into the parking lot of the church, my parents wondered aloud if the preacher’s wife would have the nerve to show up with yet another batch of salmon croquettes.
“ ‘Surely this time she’ll bring something different,’ my mother would say.
“‘Surely,’ echoed my father. And every month, there they were, laid out like an overcooked, sacrificial offering atop the long folding table: two layers of round patties, blackened on both sides and pinkish-orange in the middle.”
Betty Love makes a funny face when she gets to this point in the story, as if to emphasize the awfulness.
“We had no idea what salmon croquettes were, only that they went down better with lots of ketchup. Daddy made us eat them, of course, so as not to offend the preacher, or, even worse, the preacher’s wife. So we swallowed fast and prayed we wouldn’t gag on a bit of fishbone.”
Betty Love was well into her thirties before she realized not every church subscribes to the potluck theory of feeding the faithful. When she moved away to take a job in Louisiana, she attended a church that served catered food. Where’s the faith in that, Betty Love wants to know? Just as the Lord invites everyone to the table, the potluck makes room for all manner and degree of cooking skills and imagination. While one believer may think his tofu chili with extra jalapeños is heavenly, his fellow pilgrim might consider hot and spicy as evidence that the devil is indeed alive and well. The “anything goes” approach of the potluck implies that whatever is provided will be acceptable and appreciated. Which brings us to Mrs. Jenkins and her chipped beef on toast.
One year everybody got sick as dogs within hours of the potluck and although no one can be sure, the bulk of the aspersion was cast squarely toward the Jenkins’s kitchen.
“Mother had been over there once for a Circle meeting,” says Betty Love, “and she just happened to notice that the drip pans on the stove were stained and there was a funny smell coming from the crisper in the refrigerator. She never looked at Mrs. Jenkins quite the same way again.”
Oh the stories Betty Love could tell! Back in 1992, there was a disproportionate number of yellow vegetables and frozen salads that October when her mother was in bed with a bad back and someone else, probably Mrs. Jenkins now that she thinks about it, took over as temporary chairwoman of the potluck committee. And how one time the choir director claimed he put plenty of real sugar in the iced tea, but everyone knew it was artificial sweetener because he was trying to lose weight before the upcoming choral competition over in Chapel Hill, and so some of the congregants drank grape juice from the communion closet instead. But Betty Love was raised right, so she won’t say another word.
Taking a covered dish to church for a potluck—or “Add a Dish” or “Meal Day,” depending on where you hail from—is an obligation for some, an initiation into a new faith community for others, and a way of life for a lot of us. Be it to welcome a new preacher, honor a congregant who’s turning ninety, celebrate a holiday, or convene the annual meeting, such sharing of food with friend and visitor alike is surely a kind of communion.