by Chris Jay
This site is funded by tips from readers. Securely support Chris with a tip of $5 or more by clicking the “Buy Me a Taco” button.
I should begin by saying that I know next to nothing about the Evening Light Tabernacle on Highway 371 near Sarepta, the town where I grew up. The congregation – which doesn’t overtly affiliate itself with any specific denomination, so far as I can tell – built a big, new complex about 10 years ago along the road that I travel in order to see my parents a couple of times each month. Over the years, I’ve probably driven past the Evening Light Tabernacle a hundred times without giving it a second thought.
My mom and I love to go “junkin’.” Junkin’ just means driving around small towns in northwestern Louisiana and southwestern Arkansas, stopping anywhere that looks like it may have good junk for sale. Usually, I wind up with a trunk full of old vinyl records, church cookbooks and other flotsam and jetsam. My mom fills grocery bags with clothing that she thinks may fit someone she loves, dog-eared books about diabetes management, and old fishing gear that my dad will never use.
Each year over the first weekend in November, several of the little towns in Webster Parish – Minden, Cotton Valley, Sarepta, Cullen and Springhill – participate in a 50-mile-long garage sale called Main to Main Trade Days, and it is glorious. Up and down Highway 371, businesses, homes, churches and parking lots fill with objects cast aside by others, deemed junk. For the most part, prices aren’t marked. If you’re interested in something, you simply pick it up and shout: “How much you gotta have for this?”
I’m not sure exactly what year it was when I stopped at the Evening Light Tabernacle for the first time. Maybe it was 2014. Their enormous LED sign had been legible from a half-mile away:
“Where will you spend eternity?,” the LED sign inquired.
Mind your own business, I thought.
“Turnip green soup,” the LED sign flashed.
My car practically steered itself into the church parking lot.
Inside the main building of the tabernacle, folding tables are covered with piles of outdated electronics, Christian literature, baby clothes, and the kind of As Seen on TV bric-a-brac that fills the “Housewares” section at Goodwill stores. Teenage girls in Pentecostal-style denim skirts sell homemade fudge and excellent chocolate bundt cakes near the entrance. In a back corner, several older women staff a concessions stand where they ladle out fragrant, dark green soup for $5 per bowl. Call it gumbo z’herbes, if you want to feel more like a New Orleanian and less like an Arkansan.
I ate my first bowl while sitting on the trunk of my car in the direct Autumn sunlight, just flabbergasted by how good it was. The depth of flavor, the warm embrace of the potlikker and the weird heaviness of the bowl, as if someone had poured a large bowl of perfectly prepared red beans and sausage into a pot of old-fashioned mixed greens. It sounds gross, but it’s not. As I sat on the trunk of my car, dozens of strangers passed, heading to their own cars, gingerly cradling their own bowls. Several nodded in my direction, calling out some equivalent of “This stuff’s great, huh?”
Over the last few years, the Evening Light Tabernacle’s turnip green soup appears to have become a bigger deal. Out-of-context yard signs reading “Turnip Green Soup” line the roadsides for a mile from the church. You get the sense that, in homes nearby, husbands shook their wives awake this morning, whispering: “Honey, wake up, the Pentecostals are making greens today.”
This year, after I ate my soup, I decided to go back in and ask for the recipe. The church lady staffing the window pointed to a pre-printed stack of recipes. Reading the surprise on my face, she stated simply that I wasn’t the first to ask.
The recipe is not sexy. It does not suggest the history or bounty of the South, and could just as easily be made in California as South Dakota. The potlikker that I’d imagined resulted from a day-long, onerous process of slow-simmering smoked meats and triple-washing stripped collard leaves (“It’s a pain, but that’s how grandmomma did it.”) instead resulting from dumping several highly-processed foods together and doing something else for an hour.
But that’s the kind of Southern cooking that I recognize as true, a kind that sought to minimize labor and maximize flavor; the most bang for the buck. We ate two kinds of food growing up: homemade and store-bought. Some would say that we ate a lot of junk. But the thing about junk is, it’s in the eye of the beholder.
Evening Light Tabernacle’s Turnip Green Soup
2 – 10 oz. bags frozen and chopped turnip greens
2 – 1.4 oz. packages Knorr Vegetable Recipe Mix
2 cans pinto beans
1 lb. smoked sausage, cut into pieces
2 tsp. Louisiana or Crystal Hot Sauce
2 Tbsp. sugar
5 cups water
To taste: Garlic, onion, salt, pepper, Tony Chachere’s or preferred seasoning mix
Instructions: Mix all ingredients and simmer for one hour
Enjoy this article? Tip the author $5 to keep paywall-free, ad-free food writing happening in Shreveport and North Louisiana, or become a subscriber for $10 a month.
Subscribe to the Stuffed & Busted e-newsletter—it’s free!
