The food co-op at my liberal arts college served fantastic weekday lunches, and members could spend an hour a week volunteering for a reduced price. I loved tossing a salad in an eight-quart stainless steel bowl, my (gloved) arms submerged nearly to my elbows.

Vegan mac-n-cheese, with swoon-worthy nutritional yeast umami, was one of my favorites. But we always served it alongside “not your mama’s baked beans” and that got me frowning. Why not my mama’s? What’s wrong with my mama’s baked beans?

I think the phrase was mostly supposed to be funny, even a little edgy. It implied the baked beans were 1) more flavorful, 2) vegetarian and 3) healthier than our mothers would have made them. But my mom did make healthy, vegetarian baked beans, with plenty of garlic.

I grew up with more home-cooked and healthy food than most of my peers. I remember my childhood best friend, Alyson, remarking (with appreciation!), “You eat so much brown food!” as she joined us for a lunch of tofu-walnut-snow pea stir fry with brown rice. We might have even had homemade, whole wheat bread or chocolate chip cookies (half-whole wheat and half-white wheat flour was our typical recipe) for dessert.

I benefited from a simple-living family who valued time over money, and knew how to grow and prepare real food and preferred this to earning money for packaged or restaurant food. I realize my college classmates might have been grateful to finally eat “not your mama’s baked beans,” and that I, as usual, tend to overthink things.

Do you have a section of bookshelf devoted to church cookbooks? We may stereotype them as the abundant fountains of stuff-to-put-in-jello and all manner of hot dishes. But Anabaptists know the riches of More with Less, Extending the Table, Simply in Season and the Inglenook series.

Before Michael Pollan made food philosophy cool, our grandmothers and great-grandmothers shared food wisdom and created food theology — and you can find some of these insights in church cookbooks.

Brethren Publishing House published the first Inglenook Cook Book in 1901 and a new edition in 1911. Granddaughter’s Inglenook Cookbook came out in 1942. The recipes are offered with insights of simplicity, frugality, nutrition and resourcefulness. (You can find these, and a New Inglenook Cookbook and Inglenook Desserts at brethrenpress.com.)

“Since all vegetables are compounds of cells surrounded by a woody fiber, rapid boiling tends to toughen this fibre and break up the cells, allowing many of their principles to be lost that should be retained as food,” the Inglenook Cook Book said in 1901. The 1911 edition further describes best practices for cooking vegetables.

Pleasure is built in to the values of simplicity and frugality, so whatever made its way to the table would be enjoyed as enough. A tip from the Granddaughter’s Inglenook Cookbook caught my eye:

“Trimmings left from one crust should not be worked into another as rerolling toughens it. Use leftover dough for cheese straws” (254).

Our great-grandmothers (or the Inglenook generations) may not have written down their food theology, but many were gardener-cook-philosophers. Our grandmothers and mothers (or the More with Less) generation serve up philosophy, theology and practical knowledge as rich as the contemporary cornucopia of foodies. They were ahead of their time to be mainstream-popular, but what a gift for Anabaptists and our friends!

Now that fewer of our mothers, fathers and ourselves put our hands in the dirt to grow our food, or even get elbow-deep in preparing our food, we’ve woken up to the value of food theology/philosophy, locavorism, foodie-ism. And this is good! Also good is the wisdom of our grandmothers.

If you’ve looked into century-old recipes, you’ve noticed measurements like “butter the size of an egg,”and you might want to keep in mind that our grandmothers’ hens didn’t lay XXL eggs. But a “small walnut” may not have changed much in 113 years, and I think Sister Ora means a walnut still in the shell.

Here is recipe for Welsh Rarebit offered by Sister Ora Beachley of Hagerstown, Maryland in the 1911 Inglenook Cook Book:

Cut into small pieces 1/2 pound of good cream cheese, together with a piece of butter the size of a small walnut, a pinch of salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper if you wish it right hot. Put on the stove and let the above melt well together. Just before ready to use it, add 2 tablespoonfuls of good morning milk. Have a large meat dish with large square crackers (water crackers will do) placed side by side on it. Just before you are ready to serve supper, dip a spoonful of the above mixture over each cracker. They are to be served hot.

And if you want some brown food to celebrate spring peas, here is my mom’s recipe for a stir fry:

Cut 1 lb. of tofu into 1-inch chunks. Marinate the tofu in this mixture for an hour or more:

• 1 T cornstarch
• 3 T soy sauce
• 1 T dry sherry

Heat wok or large skillet. Add 3 tablespoons of oil. Scoop the tofu out of the liquid as much as possible, and cook slowly till brown. Put tofu back in marinade. Then fry this next list, adding a bit more oil if you need to:

• 1/3 c. sliced green onions (1-in. long) – or other onion, if you don’t have green ones
• 1 garlic clove, minced
• 1 t. fresh ginger, minced; use powdered if you have to
• ½ lb. fresh snow peas (tips and strings removed), or 1 7-oz. package of frozen snow peas

Cook for three minutes. Add in the tofu with the marinade liquid. Cook until the liquid coats everything and the cornstarch thickens the mixture. Then add 1 cup of walnut pieces, and stir everything together.