Feature article
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Potluck meal marks church’s 180th year
By Fred Sauceman
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Aunt Virginia’s Easy Salad
1 onion, chopped
1 bell pepper, chopped
1 large cucumber, peeled and sliced
6 teaspoons sugar
½ cup vinegar
½ cup oil
Let sugar dissolve in vinegar. Add oil. Shake well and pour over vegetables.
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I counted 30 feet of food at Whittenburg United Methodist Church last Sunday. Food tables, crowded with Tupperware and Pyrex, ran almost the length of the bunkerlike fellowship hall.
Meatloaf anchored one end. Angel food cake iced with marshmallow cream held down the other.
Folks carried in green beans from Hunt’s Chapel and ham from Love’s Memorial. The Saturday before, in southern Greene County, Tennessee, stoves and ovens burned all day, in the 90-degree heat of late September.
Whittenburg’s cooks went all out, with soup beans and deviled eggs, potato salad and pecan pie, in honor of the 180th birthday of this rural church, not far from the banks of the Nolichucky River. Its waters powered my great-grandfather’s mill. His voice energized the Whittenburg congregation as pastor until his death in 1919.
As the name of the church and my own last name reveal, Germans settled the rich, rolling land. Sossomanns came over from North Carolina. I’m sure they were proud of their German heritage, but anglicizing the name was a way to say that they were now Americans.
Whittenburg is one of three churches on a circuit. Pastor Richie Neese preaches three sermons every Sunday, one at 9:00, one at 10:00, and one at 11:00.
“I pastor them just like I would one church,” he says. “It depends on the Sunday, but mostly I preach the same scripture, usually with somewhat of a different sermon, but based on the same idea.
“Meals and celebrations like this one today build fellowship between people, between churches. For many years, people have gotten together around tables to decide how to build the church, how to grow the church, and it’s just a continuing process of ministry.”
I don’t ever remember eating a meal in the home of my Sauceman grandparents. But on this historic day, I skip down a generation to sample what my aunt, Virginia Sauceman Ottinger, calls “Easy Salad.”
She’s 82 and arthritic, and when I called her the day before to tell her we were coming to the celebration, I interrupted onion-chopping. Her salad of onions, green and red bell peppers and cucumbers, dressed with sugar-sweetened vinegar, speaks of the garden. Her preparation of it speaks of spirit.
I thought perhaps a big bowl of that much-requested salad would be my aunt’s only contribution to this dinner on the grounds. Certainly it would have been enough. But before the eating began, this gritty lady took me around the table and pointed out macaroni with sheets of cheese on top, deviled eggs stuffed with sweet pickle relish, slaw, turkey, dressing of homemade cornbread, a beef stew with okra, and ham-seasoned greens with pot likker.
She’d made it all, with rests for her knees in between courses. “I brought a cake, too,” she whispers, “but I didn’t make it.”
So many worshippers have partaken of meals in the concrete-blocked fellowship hall that the floor is worn out, a condition which led the United Methodist Women to assemble a cookbook last year. They found a 75-year-old recipe for tomato ketchup.
Nancy Bell headed up the fund-raising project. She knows all about ignoring pain and getting down to work. She’s overcome a double-lung transplant, breast cancer and the implantation of a pacemaker. Yet she still fries labor-intensive chicken.
“It’s my mother’s recipe,” Nancy told me, on a quick break during the Whittenburg dinner. “I wash my chicken and soak it overnight in buttermilk to get the blood out. The next morning, I rinse it and pat it dry. I mix up two more cups of buttermilk, then make a blend of self-rising flour, paprika, salt and pepper.”
Nancy dips the chicken into the buttermilk, then into the flour mixture, back into the buttermilk, and makes a final dredge through the flour.
“It’s very crispy, and everybody loves it,” she says.
I ask my aunt, who managed Kern’s Thrift Stores in Greeneville and White Pine for 32 years, how often she and Nancy cook this way.
“We’ll do it again the last of October for our Lord’s Acre sale,” she answers, then gets back up to clear away some empty platters before taking a spot in an up-front pew in the sanctuary for an afternoon of gospel music.
My cousin Jimmy Sauceman compiled the history of Whittenburg Church, and in it he included a poem by Pastor Nathaniel K. Rowe that was printed in the church bulletin in March 1917. It ends with some timeless advice on getting along:
Don’t knock and kick and slam and slap
At everybody on the map,
But push and pull and boost and boom,
And use up all the standing room
At church next Sunday.
Graves of Sauceman grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins fill the church cemetery. On this anniversary day, though, we think not of death but of the life-giving, soul-sustaining power of potluck.
--------GoTriCities--------
Food writer Fred Sauceman, author of the book “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South — from Bright Hope to Frog Level,” is senior writer and executive assistant to the president for public affairs at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.
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