Conrad Boyce is the editor and publisher of the Cosmos. He has a BA in English from the University of Alberta and a diploma in journalism from Grant Macewan Community College in Edmonton. He lived and worked in the Yukon and Vancouver Island before arriving in Ontario in 1995. Beyond these pages, he is the Artistic Director of OnStage Uxbridge, and the technical manager of the Uxbridge Music Hall.
Dinner with the town
I have a good friend - a choreographer, dance teacher and long-time bachelor - who is a devotee of church suppers. Not that he goes to church for any other reason, except for the occasional dance class. Certainly not on Sunday mornings. But he loves to go on Friday nights, for the roast beef, or ham, or turkey, or pasta dinners.
A fellow, after all, can get a little tired of cooking for himself, and where else can you get a delicious home-cooked meal, with seconds even of dessert and unlimited coffee, for fifteen bucks or less, all served by the friendliest people on earth? And if you keep himself informed by reading the community calendar in your trusty weekly newspaper, you can find one of these regal repasts on almost any given week within an easy drive from home, almost anywhere you live in southern Ontario. It’s a great rural tradition.
Although we have been known to patronize the suppers at some of the other churches in the township, my wife and I can almost invariably be found at the annual roast beef dinner at Uxbridge’s Trinity United Church, held every year on the weekend before Hallowe’en. More often than not, we’ll be serving at the dinner, since Lisa has been a member at Trinity for a long time and will be on lists of potential volunteers until her dying day, I reckon.
The shift for servers at this affair is an hour and a half, during which you have the weighty responsibility of pouring drinks, replacing the placemats, clearing the dishes, and keeping a close eye on the plates of butter and pickle trays (it’s always at the beef supper, by the way, that I’m reminded of one of my culinary pet peeves - there are never anywhere near enough pickled cauliflowers in a jar of sweet mixed). Chances are that 90% of the people at your table are friends you haven’t seen in weeks or months, but you have to be very careful not to get too deep in conversation, lest you leave a coffee cup unreplenished and go to purgatory for derelictiin of duty. After your shift, your reward is theoretically to indulge in a free plate of roast beef and mashed, but you usually pay for a ticket anyway.
This year, although were asked to serve once again, we couldn’t; we were babysitting our #2 grandson (of three), four-year-old Declan. We couldn’t hardly ask the lad to fend for himself while we served, but we could do the next best thing: buy three tickets, although Declan’s was free. The theory is that pre-schoolers don’t eat much, which in Declan’s case is accurate, but if we’d brought his younger brother Callum, the church would have gone broke. He’d have consumed two entire roasts and a couple of large bowls of coleslaw.
Although Declan initially declined the opportunity for his very first church supper (“Who eats at church?”, he reasonably argued), he eventually capitulated if he was allowed to bring a couple of stuffed animals and his favourite car. The car was a good idea, because there was the inevitable 20-minute wait for a seat in the packed hall. A goodly number of acquaintances came by to meet him, and almost all of them asked him if his stuffed toys were going to have supper, too. He was polite, but after the tenth such inquiry, he looked at his grammy and grampy as if to ask why so many of our friends were clearly insane.
At last we descended the stairs, and as we did the delicious aromas wafted down the hall. The menu at the Trinity beef supper never changes - mashed potatoes (a little dry, but the gravy fixes that), peas and corn, the creamiest coleslaw ever, and beautifully well-done beef (woe betide you if you like even a hint of pink in your meat). If you’re not a coffee or tea drinker, you’re left with Tang (who knew they still sold it?), but the best part is the pie table - a dozen different varieties, all of them delicious, although most years I hem and haw but eventually choose the lemon meringue.
Well, okay, the best part of the supper isn’t really the food at all. It’s the noise of people catching up on each other’s lives, the laughter of letting go in good company after a long week at the salt mines, the sheer small-town joy of sharing a meal with the whole community.
And as we left the hall this year, Declan decided, despite all of our crazy friends, that having supper at church wasn’t so bad after all, especially the blueberry pie. In fact, after Lisa took him on a tour, he thought that churches were kind of cool. That’s a good thing for a four-year-old to discover.
So we’ll probably bring him back to our favourite beef supper again next fall. But the good folks at Trinity had better make a bit of extra food, because we might just bring his little brother, too.
