Tradition in the Kitchen: Four Catholic Cookbooks
Belonging to a 2,000-year-old Church comes with a lot of perks—like having access to two millennia worth of delicious recipes from around the globe to enrich your culinary experience! If there’s one thing Catholics love to do, it’s feast. Throughout history, the holy days and seasons of the Church have given rise to an almost endless diversity of recipes from every Catholic country. Today, I will profile four Catholic cookbooks. Each gathers traditional Catholic recipes from the world over so that you can bring the faith into your kitchen!
The Vatican Cookbook: 500 Years of Classic Recipes, Papal Tributes, and Exclusive Images by Geisser, Neiderberger, and Kelly (Sophia Institute Press, 2016)
I would be remiss if I did not put The Vatican Cookbook at the top of my list of Catholic-themed cookbooks. Written by
A Continual Feast: A Cookbook to Celebrate the Joys of Family and Faith Throughout the Christian Year by Evelyn Birge Vitz (Ignatius Press, 1991)
Over thirty years since its publication, Evelyn Birge Vitz’s 1991 classic A Continual Feast is still an excellent resource for families looking to harmonize their family meals with the Christian calendar.
A Continual Feast features over 275 traditional recipes drawn from all over the world. It also includes valuable information about customs surrounding these dishes and the feasts and seasons they commemorate, including traditional meal-time rituals that were used to strengthen family bonds and celebrate the faith. With recipes and traditions suitable for the liturgical seasons, holy days like Pentecost and All Saints, and sacramental celebrations like baptisms, confirmations, and weddings, Evelyn Vitz’s A Continual Feast is a cookbook you’ll want to have on hand.
Cooking With the Saints by Alexandra Greeley and Fernando Flores (Sophia Institute Press, 2019)
Americans are familiar with the festive orientation of certain dishes, for example. turkey goes with Thanksgiving, while ham goes with Christmas. We may, however, be unaware that saints’ feast days also had their own traditional dishes. For example, Basque lamb stew on the feast of St. Ignatius Loyola, or cottage pie on the feast of St. Patrick.
In Cooking With the Saints, professional chef Alexandra Greeley teams up with world traveler and cuisine aficionado Fernando Flores to bring the richness of Catholic cuisine to your table with dishes from around the world, including Ethiopia, Spain, Poland, Hungary, Korea, Scotland, France, Greece, and Sweden. The recipes are interwoven with over sixty saint biographies telling the stories of the heroes of our faith.
A few things particularly helpful about Cooking With the Saints include the emphasis on “celebratory cookies,” which are various baked sweets associated with the saints’ feast days. The book also has a very handy index by meal type to help you find a recipe quickly. Finally—and thankfully—there is a meticulously categorized ingredient list for each recipe to make it easy to get what you need at the store. For diversity of recipes and ease of use, Cooking With the Saints is an excellent go-to!
The Secrets of Jesuit Breadmaking by Rick Curry, S.J. (William Morrow Cookbooks, 1995)
Finally, we have to mention the 1995 book The Secrets of Jesuit Breadmaking by Brother Rick Curry, S.J., which deserves to be featured here just because of its eccentric specificity. We tend to associate Jesuit tradition with education, missionary labor, and deep spiritual discernment. But the Jesuits also have an earthier tradition no less rich: the tradition of breadmaking. The association of Jesuits with bread goes all the way back to their founder, St. Ignatius Loyola, who regularly baked bread to give to the poor and encouraged his Jesuit brothers to do the same.
Over the centuries, local Jesuit communities developed their own bread recipes, which were passed on orally from generation to generation. In the early nineties, the Jesuit Brother Rick Curry became intrigued about these customs and traveled to Jesuit communities worldwide to gather their recipes into a single text. The result is The Secrets of Jesuit Breadmaking, a compendium of 80 Jesuit recipes from around the globe, seasoned with Brother Curry’s spiritual reflections and insights. If anyone in your house wants to take their baking craft to the next level, pick up a copy of Brother Curry’s book. I personally own this one and can testify to the variety and deliciousness of its recipes!
Conclusion
There are plenty more Catholic cookbooks we could talk about, but that’s enough for today—although rest assured we’ll be revisiting this subject in the future as we profile more fantastic resources to bring the richness of Catholic tradition into your kitchen!
What are your favorite cookbooks? I invite you to join me and other Catholic homeschooling parents in our Homeschool Connections Community or our Facebook group to continue the discussion!
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