Easter Recalls Community Calendar Feasting of Great Great Grandma's Day

What we feel and celebrate this weekend as we gather for community feasts of the calendar year is well summed up in this back cover blurb from Eating at Church. Our eating traditions are well preserved in church cookbooks, the oldest type on the North American continent. To paraphrase Michael Pollan, writing in  the New York Times magazine, "If Great Great Grandma ate it, you can be sure it was real food."

Salivating over 300 Years of a Labor of Love at Aylmer and Eardley Churches

"The cooks of these 375 superlative recipes are volunteers, bubbling over with good will, know-how and friendliness. They embody commensality -- the act of building community by sharing a table.

Some dishes are prepared at home in a well-organized flurry, since they have to get to church on time. Others are cooked in the church basement kitchen by a close-knit team who love what they're doing, since it's for others.

As a child of the church in the thirties, the author cherishes happy memories of a perpetual cycle of strawberry socials, harvest suppers and silver teas. And those memories, coded in recipes like these, still stir up the intangible ingedients poured in by the hearts of those earlier 'Eating at Church' chefs."

This lively cookbook, with its chatty anecdotes, would be welcomed as an Easter host or hostess gift.

http://www.amazon.com/Eating-Church-Recipes-Aylmer-Eardley/dp/14392...