Lenten lunches a tasty tradition

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RICHMOND — Annie Chalkley stood amid the morning mayhem that during Lent is the kitchen at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, eyed the cap and apron I carried and said without hesitation:

RECIPES

All from “Therefore Let Us Keep the Feast,“ cookbook compiled by St. Paul’s Episcopal Church members.

Frances Carter’s Cheese Soufflé

16 slices day-old white bread

4 cups New York sharp cheddar cheese, grated

4 eggs

2 1/4 cups whole milk

1 teaspoon EACH dry mustard and salt

1/2 teaspoon red pepper

1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

Remove crusts from bread, butter the slices and cut into strips.

Grease a 9x13 pan and put in one layer of bread, then one layer of cheese. Repeat until bread is used up, reserving 1 cup of cheese.

Beat eggs well with milk, spices and Worcestershire. Pour over the bread and cheese. Top with remaining cheese; cover and chill 12 hours. Bring to room temperature before baking 45-50 minutes at 350º. Let stand 15 minutes before cutting.

Broiled Tomato Halves

8 medium tomatoes, not overripe

1/2 cup fine bread crumbs

1/4 cup brown sugar

1 stick margarine

1 shake EACH parsley, salt, pepper and dill

Wash and stem tomatoes. Cut in half, set skin-side down in a greased baking dish. Mix together bread crumbs, brown sugar, margarine, parsley, salt, pepper and dill, then top each tomato with 1 tablespoon of the mixture. Bake at 350º until bubbly, then broil for 1 minute.

Stephanie Halloran’s Rose Water Pound Cake

2 sticks butter, softened

1 stick margarine, softened

8 ounces cream cheese, softened

3 cups extra fine sugar (OR grind regular sugar in a blender)

3 extra-large eggs

3 1/2 cups sifted cake flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar

1 1/2 teaspoons bourbon vanilla OR 3 teaspoons vanilla

10 drops rose water (available in gourmet stores)

Cream together butter, margarine and cream cheese. Add the sugar, beating until light. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each. Add flavorings and reduce mixer to low speed. Add the combined dry ingredients in 4 batches. Pour batter into a greased tube pan. Bake at 325º for 1 hour, reduce heat to 300º and bake 30 minutes more. Cool 10 minutes before turning out of pan.

Neiman Marcus Cream Cheese Cake Squares

Bottom: 1 box yellow cake mix (without pudding)

1 cup chopped pecans

1 stick butter or margarine, softened

1 egg

Top: 8 ounces cream cheese, (regular or light) softened

2 eggs

1 cup powdered sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Bottom: Mix cake mix, pecans, margarine and egg, (easiest in food processor), and press into greased 9x12 pan. You may need to flour your hand before pressing dough.

Top: Mix cream cheese, eggs, powdered sugar and vanilla extract together and pour evenly over the bottom layer. Bake at 350º for 35 minutes until golden brown. Cool completely before cutting. Cut into small squares. Very rich but always popular.

“Suit up!“

They generally don’t turn down kitchen volunteers at St. Paul’s where 6,000 to 8,000 weekday, sit-down lunches are served during the church’s Community Lenten Series. That’s a lot of cheese soufflés.

More than 300 volunteers — representing more than 80 churches — pitch in throughout the seven-week period to help make the famed soufflés as well as the turkey salad, shepherd’s pie and other dishes that have come to identify the tradition as much as the lunchtime sermons themselves.

The Lenten weekday preaching services, which now feature local and national speakers, have been going on for a century, the lunches since the 1920s. For $7, diners can get a hot meal or a cold plate. The homemade dessert du jour is $2 more, $3 if you want ice cream on it (as well as chocolate and/or butterscotch sauces). Proceeds go to charity. Last year, more than $25,000 was donated to 23 organizations.

It’s one-stop shopping for nourishment on many levels.

“This is one of the defining things we do,“ said the Rev. D. Wallace Adams-Riley, who was called as rector last fall and has been looking forward to his first Lenten season at the church with great anticipation. “There’s such a great spirit about it.“

I wanted to see what it was like behind the scenes, so I offered to help last Wednesday on the first day of this season’s lunches at the church at East Grace and North Ninth streets, just across from Capitol Square. Wednesdays are traditionally the busiest days — the Wednesday menu always features cheese soufflé, which has become the signature dish of the Lenten Lunches.

Under the direction of Chalkley, a genial taskmaster and the cook-team leader on the day I showed up, I chopped red onion and fresh basil, peeled cucumbers, brushed olive oil and sprinkled seasonings on halved tomatoes, browned ground beef for pasta sauce, sliced trays of cheese soufflé into squares, dished up green beans and waited tables.

And I wasn’t working nearly as hard — or skillfully — as anyone else.

Volunteers were toiling at various stations around the kitchen; the sinks, ovens and stovetops were engaged. Only a few hours before the lunchtime crowd arrived, the pace was quick and the anticipation was building, but the banter and mood remained light. Volunteer Miffy Hall wore bunny ears.

“The place to be is in the kitchen,“ said Lisa French, whom I joined at a work table with Karyn Horne and Karen Whipp to slice and season tomatoes. “It’s the camaraderie of it all.“

There wasn’t a lot of time for standing around, and even when I stopped for a second to survey the scene, Chalkley was lurking nearby.

“Excuse me.“ she said. “No one stands still in this kitchen!“

She laughed after she said it. But then she handed me a chef’s knife and assigned me another task.

I left the kitchen long enough to go into what’s called the “middle kitchen” where I found the jovial Zarouhi Deloian slicing lemons and chatting away. She volunteers three days a week at the lunches. She’s 87. Her husband, Harry, is also a kitchen stalwart.

“I love it,“ said Zarouhi Deloian, whose family has attended St. Paul’s since 1915. “It’s my church, and this is something I can do for it.“

Volunteering is a tradition with the lunches: mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, friends and neighbors.

When she was in middle school, Alice Sharp, 36, began volunteering with her mother, Yvonne Gold, a longtime kitchen volunteer. After moving back to town, Sharp worked in the kitchen when she was pregnant with twins and now serves as volunteer coordinator with Judy Winston.

Charlotte McCutcheon, 82, has been serving the cheese soufflé every year for the past 35. When it came time to fix the plates and hand them to the waiters for the first of two lunch seatings, I was stationed in an assembly line between McCutcheon and her sister-in-law Judy Smith. McCutcheon would place the soufflé and broiled tomato halves on the plates, I would spoon on the green beans and Smith would add the slices of crusty bread.

“Is there a secret to doing this?“ I asked McCutcheon.

“Not talking,“ she said.

When the orders started flying in and I was dishing up beans for all I was worth, I realized what she meant. I mostly kept my mouth shut.

The food is as much a tradition as the event itself. Many of the recipes originated from church members and have been used for years and for a long time were recorded on cards kept on a ring. Now many of them have been published in a cookbook, “Therefore Let Us Keep the Feast” (available for purchase at the church for $10). The fare tends toward the comfort spectrum: meatloaf, chicken parmesan, beef Florentine, crab cakes and cheese soufflé — a tasty bit of home cooking developed by longtime parishioner Frances Carter that’s been served for more than 30 years. A special soufflé team makes an average of 15 pans each Wednesday’s lunch, the time-consuming process beginning on Tuesday mornings with the cracking of 225 eggs.

And, of course, there is the Lenten message.

A few minutes before the lunchtime crowd arrived, Adams-Riley gathered the volunteers in the parish hall. They stood in a circle and held hands, as Adams-Riley led them in prayer.

Dear God, May these gatherings be a time of refreshment and renewal ... for all those you bring through these doors. Bless all who help prepare the food and do all the countless tasks that make this series, this ministry, so power-packed.

Amen.

Bill Lohmann writes for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

SIDEBAR

With imagination and good humor, he feeds the volunteers

It doesn’t exactly rise to the level of a loaves-and-fishes miracle, but the culinary handiwork of Walter Scott is no less appreciated by those he feeds.

Scott, 70, is a regular kitchen volunteer during St. Paul’s Lenten Lunches, and on the days he works his task is to prepare food for the dozens of other volunteers.

“My job basically is to come in in the morning, see what’s left over from the day before and create lunch,“ said Scott, who is retired from a career of banking, investing and fundraising. He served as overall coordinator of the lunch program several years ago.

He’s not the only man who works in the kitchen, but he is — as several female volunteers cheerfully pointed out — the only one privileged enough to be inducted as an honorary member of the Episcopal Church Women organization at St. Paul’s.

“I’m glad it’s just honorary,“ Scott said with a laugh.

On the first day of this season’s lunches, Scott took the leftover cheddar cheese used for the cheese soufflé and used it to make pimento cheese spread — without the pimentos, which apparently were left off the shopping list.

“My recipe is a bowl full of grated cheese, enough mayonnaise to make it movable and half of a chopped-up onion,“ he said. “Usually I try to use a sweet onion, but this time what we had was a red onion. Since I don’t have pimentos, the red onion gave it some color.“

He added crumbled bacon, a few splashes of Worcestershire sauce and hot sauce, and then spread it on slices of bread and heated it under a broiler. He couldn’t refill the platter fast enough.

He also jazzed up a pot of canned tomato soup with the rest of the cheese, along with milk, water, Worcestershire sauce and hot sauce, basil, salt and pepper. It also went fast.

Scott alternates with Bev Sale, who has been doing the job longer than Scott and who although she was off this day contributed egg salad she’d made from scrambled eggs left over from a parish breakfast.

“She’s very creative,“ Scott said.

And he’s no slouch when it comes to inspired kitchen creations.

“One time they had a German potato salad, which, of course, had no mayonnaise in it,“ Scott recalled. “They had a lot of left over, so I made some chicken broth and dumped all of this potato salad into the broth. It was absolutely delicious. One of the best soups I ever made.“

Scott has cooked for years.

When he was first married and living in Charlottesville, more than 40 years ago, Scott and his wife were preparing fresh rockfish for dinner. He remembered the way his mother used to make slits in the fish for onion and bacon, and how he needed to oil the pan — everything except how long to cook it. So, he made a long-distance call home to ask his mother.

Her answer? “Until it’s done,“ Scott said with a laugh.

— Bill Lohmann