Forty-eight years in a church kitchen. One green book.
"Big pot or little pot, it's the same love."— Mother Essie
My name is Essie Lee Hollins. Folks at Bethel Grove Missionary Baptist Church call me Mother Essie. I learned to cook at eight years old beside my mother and my grandmother on a sharecropping place outside Itta Bena, where you cooked what the land and the commissary gave you, and you did not waste a bit of it.
In 1971 our church built its fellowship hall, and I joined the Kitchen Committee under Mother Clementine Bass, who ran that kitchen like a railroad. For 48 years I cooked in that hall. Sunday dinners after service. Homecoming every August. Fish fries for the building fund. Men's Day breakfasts. And more repasts than I can count, feeding a grieving family and two hundred people who loved them.
Every pot that came out of that hall got written down in a green ledger that lived in the drawer under the serving window. How much for 50, how much for 200, and what Mother Clementine wrote in the margin when somebody got it wrong.
When my husband Velt passed in 2020, I stood in my own kitchen and cooked a hall-size pot of greens out of habit. For one woman. That's when I knew. I brought the ledger home, and page by page I cut every recipe down to a family pan and to a pan for just me. My grandchildren helped me type it up. This book is that ledger.
