by Chris Jay
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One of my favorite annual food events in Shreveport isn’t much of an event at all. Some time in mid-October, a simple, brightly colored mailer shows up in my mailbox. It’s an order form from the Greek Orthodox Ladies Philoptochos Society’s Annual Greek Pastry Sale. I tear it open and pore over it as if it were the Daily Racing Form. I only see these words once each year and, though I’m not of Greek descent, they excite me: Kourabiedes. Ergolavas. Loulourakia.
Each year, I delight in the little mysteries encrypted in the order form. The 2019 form said there’s a new recipe for kourabiedes – the popular Greek Christmas cookies that are commonly called walnut sugar cookies. What’s that all about? Also, an entirely new cookie has appeared, which almost never happens. Will I like finikia, my stomach wonders? Should I risk ordering a half-dozen finikia, only to wind up wishing that I’d ordered more baklava, instead?
On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I’ll pick up my order at the activities building behind St. George Greek Orthodox Church in Highland. A matronly Greek elder, usually flanked by several teenage volunteers, will help me locate a big, white box with my name scrawled across the top. Inside: Golden baklava made of impossibly delicate sheets of pastry and crumbly kourabiedes that melt on the tongue like snowflakes.
Seeing the longing in my eyes, the elder will dispatch one of the teens to retrieve the greatest item of them all: frozen hand-made spanakopitas, pastry triangles stuffed with spinach and cheese. If you have only eaten spanakopitas in restaurants, you will be shocked by the quality of a spanakopita that has been handmade by a Greek grandmother under the assumption that it would be consumed by a member of her church. There is a world of difference.
There is so much work in this food, so much community, and so much history.
The sale has been held each year since 1956, when the first event was advertised in The Times as a bazaar featuring “household items, Greek pastries, and various Yuletide gifts.” The pastries must have been a runaway success that first year, because by year two there is no mention of household items or Yuletide gifts – the event is billed as a pastry sale. By 1962, just six years after the sale debuted, it had clearly become a local holiday tradition.
“It is Greek pastry time again,” opens a write-up about the 1962 sale in The Times. “Many local hostesses choose this time to acquire a number of unusual and delectable desserts for holiday entertaining.”
2019 will mark 63 years of the sale, which is brilliantly timed to coincide with upcoming holiday parties. Funds raised by the sale have helped build an orphanage in Cyprus, supported a home for the blind in Athens, and built an activities center at St. George’s in Shreveport, among dozens of other neighborhood causes that have benefited over the decades.
As pastry sale organizers and volunteers toil together over enormous batches of baklava, carefully layering sheets of phyllo dough, pistachios and honey, the same thing happens to the church members that happens to the pastry: a bond forms.
“We get together, we bake together, we visit with each other and become like a church family,” said Martha Marak, president of the local chapter of the Philoptochos Society. “A lot of us work, so we bake whenever we can get a group of ladies together. We give it the time that we can give it.”
According to Marak, it hasn’t been too difficult to convince younger members of the church community to tie on aprons. You might think that they’d have to drag the next generation of pastry-makers into the kitchen kicking and screaming, but Marak says that hasn’t been the case. The entire congregation is invited to help out with the bake sale, but generally the ladies of the church are the ones who heed the call.
“The kids of the ladies who started the sale are now running it, and we’re getting ready to pass it along to a third generation,” Marak said. “We want to keep our heritage thriving and if we don’t do this, I think, we’re all a little nervous about what will happen.”
What dynamos these women must have always been, to be able to pull all of this together while organizing households, working, and rearing children who turned out to be wise enough to see the value in preserving their heritage.
The very idea of a ladies’ society may be off-putting to some, and I understand why that would be the case. In Shreveport, Louisiana, the word “heritage” itself is so mired in contemporary identity politics that I pause for a moment before typing it out, asking myself if there’s some other word that I can use instead.
But, to me, the Ladies Philoptochos Societies of the world don’t represent a nostalgia for a time when women were happy homemakers. To me, they provide one small example of how women have carried the mantle of culture with them along with all of the other things that they have to carry. Culture, after all, accumulates over time, laid down in delicate layers.
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