From church cookbooks to one piece of chicken

My mother had a few church cookbooks when I was growing up, and the recipes had been submitted by women who survived the Depression, who perhaps had many mouths to feed, no fancy or exotic ingredients, and no food processors.

Those cookbooks used to be the default church fundraiser half a century ago. I used to work at a print shop whose specialty was producing such publications, and we churned out dozens of cookbooks from little towns in Iowa and surrounding states.

It was the first time I’d heard of Sleepy Eye, Minn., because a church there contracted with us on a project. At the time, it seemed like such a funny name. I have since learned that the town was named for a Sisseton Sioux Chief by that name.

Our company did have at least one far-flung account involving a Christian school in California. We advertised in some church magazines, and this school picked us over other cookbook producers.

We probably had the best price, being midwestern and all, and while I can’t swear to it, it wouldn’t have surprised me if someone in California had relatives in the Sioux County town where I worked. We called that web of relationship “Dutch Bingo.”

Relatives or not, near or far, the production of each cookbook was much the same. We’d receive pages — stacks really — of typed recipes, and in those long-ago days, we used Compugraphic typesetting machines, which spat out long galleys of text as the paper was fed into a processing bath.

The wet snakes of typeface were then placed on a heated surface call the “dryer.” Then we’d bend the long strips like ribbon candy and send them back with the original pages to be proofread by the cookbook committee.

After the galleys were returned to us and we made corrections, we ran the strips through a “waxer,” a machine that distributed a fine layer of melted wax on the backs of the strips. Then the recipes were cut apart and positioned onto paste-up pages.

For anyone familiar with journalism back in the day, you’ll know that this was also the way newspapers, magazines, and printed material were produced. That manual process ceased long ago with the advent of desktop publishing.

While the galley and paste-up method was labor-intensive, there was a deep satisfaction when the finished newspaper rolled off the press, or the cookbook was finished with a spiral binding.

Inside their covers, most of the cookbooks carried the same kinds of recipes with a definite Midwestern sensibility. There were lots of hamburger casseroles and endless pages of Jell-O recipes in the salad section, but Jell-O might also figure into some desserts, too. It was a church supper staple.

Years ago, Wes Jackson, co-founder and president emeritus of The Land Institute, wrote an essay, “Becoming Native to This Place” where he recounts finding a box of programs for a women’s group in Matfield Green, Kansas, a town that had seen better days.

Rather than discount the lives of the uneducated women in a dusty town, he examined their work with an anthropologist’s eye, recognizing the humanity in their quest for self-improvement.

In their own way, church cookbooks and the production of them are artifacts worthy of anthropological study, too. They represent a way of doing things at a certain time, in a certain place. We can laugh at or sniff at the ubiquity of cream of mushroom soup and tater tots and say, “We are so much better off with our arugula and avocado toast” and no doubt that is true.

If the compilers of all these cookbooks were anything like the folks in my hometown of Hospers, they were hard-working people trying to live decent and honest lives, and it’s both mean and lazy to demean their less-than-sophisticated foodways.

It’s also mean and lazy for the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, to insult Americans by saying a paltry piece of chicken about as thick as a Sharpie, a corn tortilla, one broccoli floret, and “one other [unnamed] thing” constitutes a meal. Maybe for a toddler, but even then, it’s ridiculous. This is when a laugh or a sniff is an appropriate and deserved response.

I’m old enough to remember when “putting food on the table” involved direct, physical labor. For my parents, it meant planting two big gardens, weeding and watering, harvesting and preserving. And no doubt my mom cracked open that church cookbook when it came time to make watermelon pickles.

Many Americans are trying to find ways to rise up and resist the fascist-driven administration. During WWII, Americans planted Victory Gardens as a way of feeding themselves, instilling self-reliance, and relieving the pressure on the wartime food supply.

Perhaps resistance might include reviving this practice. We could call our little plots Democracy Gardens and create community and church cookbooks (albeit online) to reflect new recipes as we discover how to feed ourselves again.

Thanks, but no thanks, Secretary Rollins. We can do better than your simulated starvation.

Joan Zwagerman has tried to garden, but she needs a mentor and a plot.