I am of the generation whose Mommas made casseroles.
I grew up when covered dish dinners on the church lawn were regular events As an impatient child, church services lasted far too long for me to sit still. When we had to stay later for congregational meetings, I thought I would expire before those old people quit talking. Communion and Baptisms were slightly more interesting what with the little glasses of purple juice or the hope of a screaming baby when the minister splashed water on her head.
Only one thing was really worth staying for…the covered dish dinner. It was always called dinner but was really lunch. During the gap between the service and the food, we kids had a free-for-all romp on the front lawn of the church. Several spontaneous games of tag would break out with running and screaming and falling. When we showed up for lunch, Sunday clothes were smeared with grass stain and dirt and I had always managed to lose that little bow tie that Mom and Dad liked.
At just about thirteen, boys and girls would begin to leave the melee and wander in clusters toward the back lawn nearer to the food. The boys would gather in one clump still jostling and ogling while the girls, more grown up, would talk and glance over at us. The girls, I know now, were thinking, “What is wrong with them?” The boys, at least this one, were thinking, “What is wrong with me?”
On the back lawn behind the Fellowship Hall of Unity Presbyterian Church, the men of the congregation would unfold five or six long tables. Some of the ladies would spread starched tablecloths like a communion service while others hustled out food from the church kitchen.
It was a time when responsibilities were strictly divided by gender. I know this because once, as an exuberant 14-year-old trying to help, I moved a serving plate about a foot down the table. I turned to face three stern glares and watched as the pineapple filled green Jell-O was jiggled right back into its proper place. Chalk down one lesson in restraint.
Macaroni and cheese, green beans, pork and beans, potato salad, and pineapple salad, were laid out beside more exotic dishes like squash casserole or pickled beets. One constant was the English pea and mushroom soup casserole camouflaged with Durkees fried onion rings. Without those crispy little onion rings, the other two ingredients scored zero on the kid chart.
It was a time before Tupperware was acceptable at church. White Corning Ware with little blue flowers was the transport vehicle of every household and every piece had the owner’s name scrawled across the bottom in Magic Marker so they could reclaim it after the meal. Glass covers were usually stowed under the tables and I have seen otherwise composed ladies run back and forth lifting the tablecloths searching for a missing lid like it was a lost child.
Along with the casseroles, pimento cheese, egg salad and chicken salad sandwiches were always stacked on plates. I believe there were three kinds of sandwich makers depending on the social status they aspired to. One group removed the crust and carefully cut the sandwiches into one inch by three-inch rectangles and arranged them neatly on a three-layered serving tray. They were a work of art and I was afraid to touch those lest the serving tray tip over and expose my awkward ways.
A second, less self-conscious group also removed the crust but cut the sandwiches into four triangles and layered them on a clear plate. There were side-mouth whispers about the unanointed ladies who just made good sandwiches, cut them in half and put them on a regular plate. Hungry boys always went for the real sandwiches.
In my younger days, the king of the feast was home-fried chicken. Later in life, red and white buckets of extra crispy would appear on those tables but this was a magical time long ago when a tub of Crisco sat beside every stovetop. When my mother plunged her worn, red-handled oversized spoon into the Crisco, she came out with a glob the size of a snowball and watched it melt into the deep cast-iron frying pan. Pieces of chicken were rolled in flour and tenderly laid into the pan a few at a time. When they came out golden and glistening with oil, she put them on a paper towel covered plate. The last in and the last out was the chicken liver. That was hers. She did love a chicken liver.
I am a devotee of deviled-eggs but for years I sneered at the pretension of the ladies with their specially made deviled-egg plates. That was too silly, I thought, and those ladies probably cut their sandwiches in little rectangles. Life teaches us humility and so it did one dark day when Mother-in-Law Betty sent the Easter left-over deviled-eggs home with me. I put them on a paper plate covered with tin foil and put them on the back seat of the Ford Escape.
When I arrived home and opened the back door, I found egg smeared on the seat and down the door. Another lesson learned. One lonely determined deviled egg had stayed under the foil. What the hell, I ate it on the spot.
Time and lawsuits and now Covid have, for the most part, done away with the covered dish dinner. Finding one is like stepping onto the yellow brick road and seeing Oz in the distance. My sister and brother-in-law discovered one of these endangered dinners near their home on Edisto Island. A couple of times a year, the Allen AME Zion Church on the road to Botany Bay opens its doors and invites the public to lunch. All the delicacies of the traditional covered dish are there plus fried fish and, I have to admit, shamefully, a personal favorite, strips of crispy fried fatback. Like the church dinners of the sixties, the ladies of the church stand near the door and beam as visitors heap well-deserved praise on them. I try to be there for those days.
In the South, the road to heaven has always been paved with casserole dishes. When we lose someone dear to us, we search for some way to show our concern for the family and express our sense of shared loss. I used to believe that it was unfeeling to crowd into a house where a family was grieving. I have come to believe that it is our nature to form a circle of care around those we hold dear.
While the casserole is not as ubiquitous as it once was, friends still show up with food to feed the family and to express the inexpressible: “Even though I don’t know what to say and can only share your grief, here’s a little dish of love.”
As the family’s “picky” child, I steered clear of anything that might have been characterized as a vegetable. I confess that I was an adult full grown before I understood the joys of tomato sandwiches, creamed corn, black-eyed peas and green vegetables of any variety. My mother, years after I corrected the errors of my errant days, could still be heard saying at family dinners, “Mike won’t eat that.” My full plate and my excess tonnage were never enough to change her mind.
As I was writing this, nostalgia drifted through Hill house like the scent of a vanilla candle and I broke out the recipe box. Two hours later, in a kitchen covered in pots and pans and spilled ingredients, I produced a chicken and broccoli casserole in Momma’s blue and white Corning Ware dish. Loaded with mayonnaise, cream of chicken soup, butter and with a breadcrumb crust, it was rich and warm and good enough so that Cheryl had to hide a little left-over chicken for the Bailey the beagle.
Sometimes I dream of parades of casserole dishes broken up by floats of pimento cheese sandwiches and marching bands of fried chicken with a big punch bowl of Kool-Ade bringing up the end like Santa’s sleigh. I need to stop here lest my reverie spots the dessert table and I am back in the kitchen making a terrible mess.
After the dinner of broccoli and chicken, my live-in muse cut right to the heart of the matter.
“Do you know how to bake comfort?” she asked.
In answer to my quizzical look she said, “At 350 degrees for about 45 minutes.”
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