Food & Fellowship

I randomly grabbed a book titled "Food & Fellowship" out of the box of cookbooks I bought at an estate auction a few weeks ago -- If you want to see more details about that, see the post titled, "Marie's Recipes".

It's a church cookbook from Rockville, Maryland published in 1982. On the surface it seemed unremarkable...I'm not a fan of self-published community cookbooks because they all seem alike to me and certainly wasn't expecting what I encountered.

Marie, the owner of this book, had heavily annotated the recipes, but not in the usual way of making comments about whether the recipe was good or whether she had changed anything when making it. What makes this unique is that she annotated the book with comments about the people who contributed the recipes!

Here are some of the recipe titles and the annotations:

Recipe - Dinny's Country Cheese Ball from Lois Harris
Comment - "Lois is Daniel's Washington "grandma" and an incredible cook"

Recipe - Favorite Cheese Ball from Peg Sherman
Comment - "Peg is a former member who is the American Baptist's "official observer" at the United Nations"

Recipe - Authentic French Onion Soup from Dot Root
Comment - "Dot is a lovely, joyous Christian who is waging a fight against an unusually incurable form of cancer. She's been a real inspiration."

Recipe - Minestrone Soup from Lois Nuse
Comment - "Lois was the church secretary and the one who really ran the church. They just moved to Florida to retire."

Contrast the last comment with this one:
Recipe - Vichysoise from Ruth Taylor
Comment - "Ruth is the new church secretary" (but no notation that she is now REALLY running the church)

Recipe - Copper Coins from Sharon Harris - Ewing
Comment - "Sharon is an American Bptist minister in Boston. She was first in her seminary class -- a brilliant scholor. She was the first person who grew up in Twinbrook to go into the ministry. The recipe is good, too."
The comment about the recipe cracks me up!

Recipe - Stir Fried Spinach from George Zachariah
Comment - "George was church moderator for two years. He came to America from India 25 years ago. He is a philosophy professor."

Recipe - Spicy Apple Muffins from Emily Kinnamon
Comment - "My brother's some-time girlfriend -- she's like a sister to me"
Now, Marie is getting a little gossipy. Was Emily a friend with benefits???

Recipe - Jello-Cheese Salad Mold from Paul McGrath
Comment - "Paul was blinded by diabetes and has undergone 2 kidney transplants. Still, he works -- as an accountant."
I did not add the punctuation. I think Marie was wondering about a blind accountant.

Recipe - Forgotten Cookies from Sherry Haire
Comment - "Sherry has a 21 year old sister who is retarded and now Sherry teaches handicapped kids."

Recipe - Kang - Pao Chicken from J. Bennett Easterling
Comment - "When he isn't making spicy oriental food, Ben works for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He also likes Bill's jokes, which says a lot about the man..."
Again, I did not add the punctuation. I believe Bill was Marie's husband.

I've gone through the whole book and yet, I cannot determine who she was writing these notes for???