The Church Supper and the Potluck

The church supper and the potluck rest on a simple arrangement: each household brings a dish, and the congregation eats from the whole. In the American South the tradition is bound up with the Black church, which for generations served as a place of worship, a school, a meeting hall and a centre of mutual aid when other institutions were closed to Black Americans. Toni Tipton-Martin, in Jubilee, gathers the recipes of African American cooks across two centuries and treats the cooks themselves as authors, and the church table is among the settings in which their skill was most often seen and judged.

The form is plain and its demands are exacting. A supper after a service, a homecoming, a funeral repast or a fundraiser draws on dozens of kitchens, and no committee assigns the menu in full; the cooks know what the table expects. Fried chicken, baked ham, greens, macaroni and cheese, rice, potato salad, yeast rolls and cornbread appear again and again in the books of the region, and the cakes and pies come last, set along a separate table. Each dish is carried in the vessel in which it was cooked, and it is judged by those who know the hand that made it. In Jubilee, Tipton-Martin sets out to correct a long habit of erasing the African American cook from the record of American cooking, and she shows how much of that cooking was done with skill, thrift and a trained sense of order. The church supper is one place where that skill was exercised in public. A cook's pound cake or her preserves carried a reputation within the congregation, and the standard was kept by the community itself, not by any written authority. The dishes in the book show the range of what such cooks held in their repertoire, from yeast breads and layered cakes to pickles, preserves and carefully managed fried foods. The discipline of the shared table is practical as well as social. Food that must travel and wait needs dishes that hold their quality: a baked dish that keeps its heat, a cake that slices cleanly, a fried bird that stays crisp enough to be eaten an hour after it leaves the kitchen. Cooks learn to season firmly, because a dish eaten warm rather than hot must still carry its flavour. The same reasoning governs the serving line, where the cook with the largest pan is placed where the demand is greatest. The potluck in its wider American form descends from the same principle of contribution, and it has spread beyond the church to the lodge, the school, the neighbourhood and the workplace. It rests on a form of trust, since no one can inspect the kitchen in which a dish was made. For that reason the sound practice of the cook is to hold hot food hot and cold food cold, and to keep perishable dishes out of the range in which bacteria multiply; a dish brought to a shared table carries the responsibility of the household that made it. What the supper preserves, finally, is a way of cooking organised around feeding many people well from modest means. It keeps recipes in circulation through use, and it passes them from one generation of cooks to the next at the table where they are tested. Tipton-Martin's book is valuable here because it treats those cooks and their dishes as a body of craft worth recording.

The flavour of the church table is firm and unhurried: seasoned greens, well-browned fried chicken, sweet potato and pound cake, with pickles and preserves to cut the richness. Dishes are seasoned to be eaten warm rather than scalding, so salt, pepper and smoked pork are used with a confident hand.