Cook Book
Elizabeth HaitIs anything more charming than a church cookbook? Cherished recipes from the best cooks in the parish. Nothing fancy, but everything delicious. And the head notes are so much fun! "First served at the annual Strawberry Fair. The Rector had seven helpings!!!" Or "This is the only way my kids will eat tripe. Maybe it will work at your house too." Then there's a chapter of favorite Coffee Hour cookies, and one on how to make your own wine. At the end, maybe there's a list of tips about running a church supper. Sample item: Don't bother making a sign-up sheet for dishwashing. No one will sign up, but the dishes will somehow get washed.

When I got the chance to edit my own church cookbook, I was all excited. I put out a nice recipe-collecting box covered with dessert-printed wrapping paper. For weeks I stood up during the Announcements part of the church service and made pep-rally pleas. "We're known for our wonderful cooks! Don't let me down!" I didn't quite say, "Let's bury the other churches in town," but almost.

Then I waited for a tide of recipes to flood over me, except that for a long time they didn't. It was exactly like the dishwashing after the church supper: the five or six most hardworking parishioners submitted three hundred recipes apiece, and no one else sent anything. (One woman who understands these things gave me recipes with her friends' names on them so that her name wouldn't appear on every page.)

Or people submitted recipes that, if I weren't a decent Christian, I'd blackmail them about. My favorite was called "Chicken" and had three ingredients: chicken, a can of cream of mushroom soup, and a can of mushrooms. Of course I put the recipe right into the manuscript. Part of the fun of a church cookbook is counting the number of times canned soups, mayonnaise, and cake mix turn up as ingredients.

Unfortunately, I couldn't balance things out with interesting chicken recipes of my own. The function of a regional cookbook editor is to pump up all the boring vegetable-type chapters. Even so, you always end up having to combine them into a single unit called something like "Soups, Salads, Sips, & Sides." This is why you must choose a font with a good-looking ampersand.

Choosing a good-looking cover is a whole other thing. My church doesn't do folk-holy. No cute angels or children bowing their little heads for us! We also don't do rustic, country, cartoon-y, or lambs. What I'm saying is, we don't do anything you can order from a stock collection of cookbook art. I knew better than to solicit opinions from other parishioners, so I hired my daughter to design a cover for us. It's dark red with a decorative gold border -- sort of like a prayer book. Wouldn't you like to buy a copy?

Actually, wouldn't you like to stock the pews at your church with a few hundred copies? Because our church's roof is leaking, and it would be nice to fix it properly instead of plugging up the leaks with all these cookbooks we seem to have on hand.

The following recipes really do come from two of my church's best cooks.

• Insalata Tonnato (Green Bean Salad with Tuna Sauce)
• Best Grits Casserole