Earlene Tatum · Jackson, Mississippi 222 entries · 14 chapters · 5 files 30-day money back

The Committee Book — No. I

Forty years of a church kitchen.Written out at last.

First Sunday. The repast. Homecoming. Two hundred and twelve plates on the day we buried a man who had been a deacon for fifty-one years.

I ran that church kitchen for forty years. Kitchen committee. Never took a dime. Everything I learned in there was written in pencil in one spiral notebook by the woman who ran it before me, and in blue ink in the margins by me, and that notebook is in a drawer in a building that may not be there in twenty years. So I wrote it out. Two hundred and twenty-two things, arranged by the day they belong to, with the counts beside them.

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The Committee Book, the large-print edition and the pan tables

I. Everything that comes with it

Five files, in your email in one minute.

Two of them are the kind of thing you tape inside a cupboard door and use for the rest of your life.

$27 $92 You keep $65
of what it is worth
The Committee Book 14 chapters, 222 entries. Arranged by the day — First Sunday, the repast, Homecoming, Wednesday night, the holidays. Every entry says the day, the count, and how to cook it down for one or two.
$27
The Large-Print Edition The same book in big type, one column, for reading with it open on the counter.
$17FREE
The Pan Tables What a pan holds and what it feeds. Every dish by the pan, every bird by the plate, the six temperatures that are not negotiable, and the oven schedule counted backwards from the hour you serve.
$19FREE
Pages from the Book Six pages out of the committee notebook as they are — Mother Inez's pencil, my blue ink, and the page with three layers on it where I crossed her out in 1991 and put her back in 1994.
$16FREE
Your Own Book Blank pages for your counts, your oven, who in your family will not eat what, and the page you hand on.
$13FREE
Total value$92
You pay today $92 $27

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II. Why it is not a recipe book

You can find a recipe.
Nobody wrote down the rest of it.

There are a hundred places to find out how to make macaroni and cheese. There is nowhere to find out that a full pan is thirty-six plates, that it takes ninety minutes and not thirty-five, that it has to sit an hour before anybody eats and therefore needs five eggs and two tins of milk instead of four and one, and that it is the dish people judge your whole kitchen by.

That is not a recipe. That is forty years of standing at a serving window, and it was in a notebook in a drawer.

Every entry in this book ends the same way, and the last line is never a flourish. It is what the dish is for.

## 10 · Macaroni and cheese for forty The rule The day — First Sunday, and there is no First Sunday without it The count — two pans, forty-eight plates, ninety minutes at 350°F Cooked down — an eight-inch dish, four plates, thirty-five minutes

III. The notebook

Her pencil. My blue ink.
And the page with three layers on it.

Mother Inez Pruitt ran that kitchen before me and started the book some time in the sixties. I wrote in the margins for thirty years. Some of what I wrote was wrong and I crossed it back out.

PAGE 41 · DRESSING Cornbread made the day before and left out on trays to dry. Do not use it fresh. Same day is fine, this is fussy. — E.T. 1991 I was wrong. Put hers back. Three Thanksgivings came out like pudding before I would admit it. — E.T. 1994

Six of those pages are in this package, set down the way they are. I have not tidied them.

IV. What is in it

Fourteen chapters. 222 entries.

Not by dish. By the day it belongs to.

Chapter Entries
I First Sunday — communion Sunday, and why the count they give you is never the count 18
II The Repast — the meal after a funeral; the fixed menu, nothing fried, and the plate that goes home with the family 18
III Homecoming — two hundred and seventy plates, two kitchens, two serving lines, planned in January 16
IV Wednesday Night — one pot, one pan, thirty tired people and ninety minutes 14
V Family and Friends Day — the Sunday strangers eat your cooking and go home and talk about it 12
VI The Holiday Table — Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, Easter and Juneteenth, each with its own plate 24
VII Potluck — thirty dishes you did not make, arriving at thirty temperatures 12
VIII The Sick-and-Shut-In Plate — the plate that goes to the people who cannot come any more 10
IX A Pan for Forty — what a pan holds, what it feeds, and what changes when a dish gets four times bigger 18
X Holding and Hauling — the hour and a half between the oven and the plate, which nobody writes down 14
XI What a Pan Costs — eleven dollars, forty plates, and the envelope that went back on Monday 12
XII Cooking It Down — I cook for one now. I still make a pan for six. 16
XIII The Window — twenty things that did not get past me, and why 20
XIV Mother Inez — what she said, what she wrote, and the day she handed me the drawer 18

V. Who is doing the cooking

I am Earlene Tatum.

I am seventy-two. I ran the kitchen at my church in Jackson, Mississippi for forty years — kitchen committee, volunteer, never took a dime — and I handed the drawer to a younger woman two years ago because I cannot stand up for a whole service any more.

Folks at that church still call me Mother Earlene. I did not give myself that and I do not introduce myself with it.

My husband Clarence is gone. My daughter Tonya is in Houston and my son Marcus is in Chicago and my granddaughter Aaliyah is at school, learning to cook off a telephone and learning some of it wrong.

I am not a chef and I have no title. What I have is forty years of feeding two hundred people on days that did not allow mistakes, and a notebook that nobody was ever going to read.

VI. Asked and answered

Your questions, plainly.

I am not cooking for forty. Is this any use to me?

Chapter twelve is the whole answer and it is the chapter I needed somebody to write for me. Every number in this book divides by four and lands in a nine by thirteen dish you already own, and every single entry has a line at the bottom telling you how it goes down to one or two plates.

Do I need a church to use it?

No. A holiday is a Homecoming with fewer people. A family funeral is a repast. A Tuesday is a Wednesday night. The days are the same days.

Are the recipes in here?

Yes, with the amounts. But the recipe is the smallest part of each entry. What is in here that is not anywhere else is the count, the timing, the order things go in the oven, and what happens to a dish in the hour and a half before anybody eats it.

Is this old-fashioned cooking?

It is cooking that was done between 1974 and two years ago on an ordinary stove, in ordinary pans, by a woman with no equipment anybody gave her. I do not know a thing about air fryers.

Is it healthy?

It is church food. There is butter in it and there is smoked meat in it. I am not a doctor and I do not give advice about anybody's health. If you have been told to watch your salt or your sugar, that is a conversation for you and your own doctor.

What about food safety, cooking for that many?

Six numbers run through the whole book and they are on the first page: 165°F for poultry, 160°F for ground meat, hot held above 140°F, cold below 40°F, two hours out of temperature — one above 90°F — and a day of thawing for every four pounds of frozen turkey. I kept a thermometer in my apron for thirty years.

What exactly do I get, and how?

Five PDFs in your email within a minute of paying. Nothing ships. No account to make, no subscription. Pay once and they are yours to keep and to hand on.

What if I do not like it?

Email me inside thirty days and the money comes back the same day, no questions. You keep the files.

VII. Written down, finally

Nobody wrote it down the first time.
I nearly let that happen twice.

Two hundred and twenty-two things, arranged by the day they belong to, with the counts beside them.

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