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I worked as a pastry chef for three years, and I’m going to let you in on a little secret: there are only so many ways you can make a chocolate chip cookie.

Social media has perverted our relationship with food.

An ordinary thing became a celebrity because we take pictures of food. We share pictures of food. We drool over pictures of food. We comment on …

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Back before celebrity chef cookbooks,

and a fixation on food porn

with painfully self-conscious artful photos of food,

and hard-to-find ingredients,

and special dietary needs and fads,

and foodies telling personal life stories as a faux gourmandise,

Nellie told my grandma Helen that the Oatmeal Icebox Cookies were g…

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Will church cookbooks survive?

This was the question posed to me when a friend emailed an article from Christianity Today on the matter. I bet you didn’t know that was a question on anyone’s lips on the eve of World War III and hyperinflation. Considering the latter, though, perhaps we need church cookbooks more than ever since they aren’t full of long lists of fancy ingredients I can’t quite figure out.

“I don’t know what that is, but I bet sour cream would suffice.”

“Huh. Sounds sort of like an onion of some kind. I’ll just use that.”

“Meh, I’ll just use garlic.”

This is how I cook. (As you know from the podcast.) Every complicated ingredient I stumble upon in today’s “easy home meals” cookbooks are pared down to the basic ingredients I have on hand in a fairly normal kitchen and my Philistine palette can’t tell the difference anyway. No wonder so many cookbooks promise you’ll lose weight if you follow their recipes; they’re so complicated no one actually makes them and you’ll starve.

I have several church cookbooks, and I love them very much, particularly the ones with my grandma’s notes in them. For a sweet lady, she pulled no punches in her review of a recipe. I will note that in the church cookbooks, there seems to be an era that was distinctly obsessed with putting Cool Whip in everything, but if you can get past that, there are some delightful casseroles, soups, and breads.

Only in a church cookbook will you find three versions of the pizza hot dish recipe, with one noting that a similar recipe was submitted by someone else so as to make sure no one’s toes were stepped on. (See photo above)

According to this article, however, these helpful cookbooks of actually affordable recipes not clogged with photos and long whispy, beige memories that modern cookbooks seem infatuated with are soon to join the dodo and become extinct.

After reading the article, I responded to my friend’s email:

1. Christianity Today is barely Christian.

2. My favorite cookbooks are the church cookbooks I have.

He responded:

Our last cookbook back home was in 1979 or so. I like seeing the names of the church folk who submitted recipes. Good memories.

That was back in the day when the recipes were by Mrs. James Walrude and Mrs. Franklin Heinlein. Nowadays they'd be taken for genderfluiders.

I about spit out my tea on my computer screen when I read that last line. Indeed.

But when my laughter had subsided, I got to thinking about the disappearance of the church cookbook. More importantly, the disappearance of people going to church in the first place.

Combined with reduced church attendance and the move to larger and larger churches where the fellowship dinner—which is what we called a potluck dinner, because we weren’t supposed to use the word “luck”—is segmented according to demographics, according to the groups or activities you’re in, or farmed out in small groups to homes and restaurants, I wondered if that wasn’t unwittingly killing the generational passing forward of the Cool Whip torch.

It’s hard, if you’re a church of 2000, to have a fellowship dinner in your church basement.

That’s a lot of hotdish. Casserole. Whatever you want to call it.

Years ago, between more serious jobs, I was a barista at the kiosk at the local airport. Not actually liking coffee only made that slightly difficult, generally when people would ask what I would recommend.

Even more years before that, the ridiculous movie "Malibu's Most Wanted" had the unfortunate effect of injecting the even …

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Recipes are kind of like getting a general sense of assemblage.

A general direction.

“You’ll be heading …

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I like a good brownie, but not enough to go to war for.

I worked in a bakery first at a grocery store, and then in a smaller one. It takes all kinds of customer interaction to get you to hate the sight of delicious baked goods.

Thankfully, the bakery closed before social media, and the rise of the philistine reviewer, really took hold. Sometimes I read Google reviews of restaurants just to pad out my prayer list because the cruelty is real.

The little bakery was a lot of work. Generally, there were two or three of us there running the whole show, from early early morning baking to lunch rush to general baking to keeping the cases stocked to serving customers and cleaning up the lunch room.

I actually really enjoyed the baking. You could get really creative with the food, and we often had a lot of fun in the kitchen. We also had a large sketchpad attached to the wall where we’d use markers to vent our frustrations with customers. The day we closed, I took photos of every page and still revisit them once in a while for a laugh.

Food service is a bipolar experience.

It was always difficult for the owner to find help. You have to have a certain skill set, or at least an aptitude, for pastries and baking. Being able to bake cookies and obsess over food blogs is not enough. Sometimes she’d hire someone solely to work the customer counter but no one wants to deal with customers so they’d find their way back to the kitchen and it never quite worked out as planned. At the end, were down to three, eventually two, and eventually closed.

My friend is glad I don’t work there anymore.

“You were always so tired,” he said.

This is a nice way of saying worn out and crabby. At one point I had to get special shoes because my arches were collapsing. I almost hated to sit down for lunch in the early afternoon because it was hard to stand back up on my feet.

“The staff isn’t friendly,” is how people would review the shop online.

Since I was working in an exhausted brain fog most of the time, I don’t doubt it. They’re lucky I could still do fraction math in my head and get the ingredients right even if I didn’t make them feel special when the money exchange went down.

One sweltering summer day, when the boss was gone for a week and two of us were manning the shop and we’d just finished a huge caramel roll order only to have the customer no-show, there was a final straw.

A man in the National Guard had emailed the owner, and she’d sent it on to us. She wasn’t upset with us; she understood and had been on the receiving end of ugly customers before (mostly mothers of the bride who want to get some money back after the wedding for a cake they’d completely eaten but was “terrible the whole time we were eating it”). I think she meant it more as a heads-up or FYI, when she forwarded it on.

We knew who this fellow was, and noticed he was sending his wife in to get his brownies following this email.

“I’ll hold the line, honey, here in the car.”

I had mixed feelings about our military’s readiness after this. Three years later, I emailed this courageous soldier out of curiosity, wondering if he was still letting his feelings drive the cart. I wanted to write about it. I wanted to find out what exactly pushed him over the edge. There was no response.

But I know very well how I felt that day.

I have a file where I wrote “Letters I Wish To Send To Customers But Won’t” and his is in there with several others. It is off-the-charts rage. I can’t even really excerpt it here, other than to say I used several words with four letters, repeatedly suggested he was a nutless wonder, and ended by writing “…maybe then you’d understand why we don’t do cartwheels on the counter when you walk in.”

“I want your business to succeed, so I’m…going to get the last two employees who come in before 5 a.m. and don’t sit down for a break until about 1 or 2 p.m. in trouble.”

O Captain! My Captain!

Please be nice to service and retail workers, even when they’re not at their best.

That was over ten years ago.

I have significantly fond memories of my time in the bakery, though few include customer interaction. One notable exception was an elderly woman who came in for a slice of quiche several times a week. She always had exact change and even when we raised our prices, we just kept ringing her up the same rather than make her feel bad about not having enough money with her. We called her Quiche Grandma, which was significantly more positive than Scotchie Nazi, a very different customer.

To this day, people still talk about the brownies.

If you want to start a ruckus in your kitchen, hopefully free of complaining emails, here’s the recipe.

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