Not Just for Sundays After Church (Published 2012) (2024)

JUSTIN SOELBERG, the chef at Communal restaurant in Provo, Utah, has heard all the jokes about Mormon food. “People think it’s just casseroles and Jell-O all the time,” said Mr. Soelberg, 30, who grew up Mormon in Idaho and graduated from the French Culinary Institute in Manhattan.

“The basic dinner was meat in cream-of-something soup on mashed something,” said Kate Jones, 31, a food blogger who grew up in Utah and now lives in Louisiana.

Even in Park City, where the Sundance Film Festival began last week, Mr. Soelberg acknowledged, “No one comes to Utah for the food.”

The Mormon culinary tradition is hard to pin down, but today it is rapidly evolving. Mr. Soelberg, who was raised on his grandmother’s cooking on a cattle ranch near Boise, Idaho, says that “Mormon food” should be seen as part of a larger Western tradition of hearty meals, seasonal eating and food preservation that is in keeping with modern farm-to-table ideals.

And as the church has widened its membership, there are more Mormon cooks to redefine the stereotype. “Once you have lived outside the ‘Utah bubble,’ you can’t go back to that food,” he said.

Rachael Hutchings, 31, the mother of two young daughters, has spent three years living in Japan. She now lives in Corona, Calif., and blogs about food (she is expert in Japanese home cooking and indulgent desserts) at lafujimama.com. Mrs. Hutchings has never lived in Utah, although her roots, like those of many American Mormons, are there. She said that church cookbooks and women’s church groups like the Relief Society helped to make some Utah dishes ubiquitous, but now horizons are broadening rapidly. The church says it has 14 million members worldwide.

“There are more and more people like me,” she said. “As the church becomes more international, that Utah Mormon food is no longer the standard.”

“We still have these basic homemaking skills, which have lost luster in mainstream society,” she said. “But we really believe that it’s important work, providing comfort and nourishment to the family and the community.” The tradition of a home-cooked family dinner after church on Sunday is alive and well, and all kinds of celebrations and meetings are accompanied by cookies, casseroles and cake.

It takes 13 Mormons to change a light bulb, goes one joke, Mrs. Wells said: one to change the bulb and a dozen to bring the refreshments. “I can’t think of a Mormon gathering that doesn’t include food,” she said.

Official doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints do not forbid any foods; according to current teachings, only coffee, tea and alcohol are explicitly prohibited. Many younger cooks use wine in cooking (in the belief that the alcohol is cooked off) and wine vinegar in salad dressings.

Mormonism is a young religion, born in the 1830s, leaving little time for food traditions to evolve. Its food doesn’t reflect one particular ethnic identity, or a region other than the Wasatch Front, the sere realms of northern Utah and southern Idaho where church leaders put down roots in the 1840s. Later, agricultural settlements stretched north and south from Salt Lake City, planting a “Mormon corridor” that still runs from Idaho to Mexico.

Food was rarely plentiful in the early years, families were large, and all households tithed at least 10 percent to the church, so women were strongly encouraged to develop cooking and budget-management skills. Being industrious and hardworking is highly prized in Mormon culture (the beehive is a symbol of the church), and for women, cooking provides a real sense of identity and daily purpose.

In the 1960s, Mormon women (like most Americans) enthusiastically embraced inexpensive convenience foods like canned fruit, instant potatoes and, of course, Jell-O.

“For some reason, the Utah Mormons took longer to come out of that phase,” said Christy Spackman, 34, a doctoral student in food studies at N.Y.U.

Ms. Spackman says that in her congregation, in Brooklyn, the tradition of socializing with food and sharing recipes is just as strong as it was when she was growing up in Logan, Utah. Only the recipes have changed. “Now the recipe is more likely to be a grapefruit curd or a new kind of granola bar than a casserole,” she said. Recipes, like one for homemade yogurt, “spread like wildfire” in the community, she said.

Many Mormon men and some women spend two years abroad working as missionaries — a custom that has given many a lingering taste for kimchi or Camembert. In Brazil, Mrs. Wells discovered a passion for dulce de leche, mangoes and black beans.

Most Mormon women, even those who pursue advanced degrees and careers, still marry and start families in their early 20s, and stay home with their young children.

Many Mormon women are accomplished and enthusiastic bakers — a logical development, because “sugar is the only vice we’re allowed to have,” Mrs. Hutchings said.

The Word of Wisdom, a key piece of scripture that the church founder, Joseph Smith, said was a revelation from God, includes language that resonates through Mormon food culture. Healthy living was of great interest to the religion’s founders, and their dietary prescriptions of little meat, much produce and plenty of whole grains make them sound like proto-Pollans.

Smith said meat should be eaten “sparingly,” preferably only in winter; that fruit, vegetables and herbs are the best foods; and that grains have specific roles (“... wheat for man, and corn for the ox, and oats for the horse ...”).

Whole grains of hard red wheat, stored in 5-gallon buckets, remain an iconic ingredient for many Mormons, particularly those who follow the emphatic teachings on food storage. “Organize yourselves; prepare every needful thing” is a fundamental counsel, encouraging self-sufficiency for individuals, families and indeed all Mormons.

Being able to feed the faithful has been a preoccupation since the founding: today, the church owns farmland and cattle ranches across the country. (A spokeswoman declined to confirm the total acreage of church holdings.)

During the Great Depression, the church established its own food distribution system, which still operates as a network of more than 100 food banks and canneries (called Bishop’s Storehouses) where members preserve their own homegrown food, or stock up on canned staples.

Today, setting aside three months’ to a year’s worth of food remains an important part of women’s work, and learning to maintain and cook from food storage is the topic of numberless pamphlets, advice columns and blogs. (Sources for this article speculated about whether Ann Romney would have a food storage facility in the White House, if her husband is elected. In an article in The New York Times about the couple’s years at Harvard, a classmate recalled their fully stocked food storage.)

There is a spectrum of observance, from the hard-core survivalists who consider it a mark of devotion to eat only dried and canned food, to the modern “mommy bloggers,” who produce cupcakes and roasted red pepper hummus from their basem*nt bunkers.

Julie Weiss, 30, who lives south of Salt Lake City, dispenses advice and recipes at foodstoragemadeasy.com, with her sister-in-law Jodi Moore. “Once you get into the rhythm of it, like making bread every day to rotate your wheat, it becomes natural,” Ms. Weiss said.

In her basem*nt, she keeps buckets of whole wheat kernels; she has an electric mill (and a hand-cranked one in case of power failures), and storage racks that fit large No. 10 cans. She researches newly available foods like freeze-dried mangoes and powdered sour cream, makes her own pizza dough and tortillas from the various grains she keeps on hand, and cans tomatoes and other vegetables from her garden.

The goal is not only to maintain the food supply, she said, but to rotate fresh supplies in by cooking the stored food. Powdered milk and eggs; dried beans; canned vegetables, fruit, and even canned meat and cheese are staples of many kitchens. (This may have something to do with the stereotypical blandness of traditional Mormon food.)

For Ms. Spackman, food storage takes the form of flour, sugar, chocolate and other nonperishable supplies to feed her baking habit. “Food storage is a habit that is not very practical in a Brooklyn apartment, but it goes very deep,” she said.

For most Mormons over 40, two standard dishes sum up the tradition: green Jell-O and funeral potatoes. Green Jell-O, a fluffy dessert of whipped cream and crushed pineapple folded into lime gelatin, is a constant presence at parties.

Funeral potatoes, a rich casserole of grated potatoes, sour cream, cheese and cream-of-something soup, is delivered to the bereaved, and serves as a side dish for ham on Christmas and Easter. It tastes like the inside of a baked potato mashed with plenty of sour cream and Cheddar, and it takes only one savory, fluffy forkful to see why the dish is a classic. (During the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, visitors found these dishes so pervasive that souvenir pins shaped like cubes of green Jell-O and casseroles of funeral potatoes became hot sellers.)

The younger generation of home cooks are, of course, reinterpreting these traditions. Mrs. Wells and Ms. Jones have made a fresh version of funeral potatoes with grated raw onions, fresh garlic and Gruyère cheese. “We understand what our audience likes and also how far we can push them,” Ms. Jones said. But Mr. Soelberg, despite his advanced culinary training, says that he does not attempt to rework the classics.

“I suppose you could make it without the condensed soup and the frozen potatoes,” he added. “But then it would be just another French potato gratin.”