Faith Works 2-2-24

Faith Works 2-2-24
Jeff Gill

What brings us together
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If the map of where you find shredded chicken sandwiches was an arson investigation, you'd say the match was lit in Licking County.

To assess the spread of shredded chicken sandwiches as a pool of warm, filling goodness across Ohio and neighboring states, you would see it pouring out from the Newark area and spreading from there, a few splashes over the state boundaries to leave a puddle here and there in West Virginia and Michigan.

I'm quite certain shredded chicken began somehow here, and followed the connections between glass factories, people who moved between plants making bottles or automotive glass, carrying with them the simple secrets of canned deboned chicken, crushed crackers, and perhaps some added cream soup or even evaporated milk to keep it moist over a long simmering stretch in a roaster.

One way to try to trace both across time and over the landscape how our local delicacy became a regional phenomenon would be to sift stacks of church cookbooks. There is a treasure trove of information in those volumes. Often spiral bound, easy to lay flat, found in all sorts of formats and page layouts, they were once a major fundraiser for ladies' aid and women's mission societies.

You will find in most of them a recipe for Scripture Cake, or references to the Holy Trinity (onion, carrots, celery in some areas; swap bell peppers for carrots in the Deep South). There's usually a charming recipe for a good life or a happy family, using a pinch of wisdom and a heaping helping of love, etc.

The real pleasure of church cookbooks, though, is how they are unique to their area and ethnic heritage. Hotdish in the Upper Midwest, burgoo in Kentucky . . . shredded chicken in central and northwest Ohio.

I suspect we could get closer to the origins of shredded chicken by searching back through church cookbooks. And while I proposed last week the connection to the glass making industry to explain the interesting pattern of where shredded chicken is, and where it isn't, following the locations of Owens-Illinois related plants in particular, I can't shake the sense that this mass feeding speciality has church-related roots.

In northern West Virginia, I learned that whether Catholic or Protestant, ethnically Italian or largely English in origin, church events like fellowship dinners, weddings, and funerals, always would have rigatoni with green beans garnished with slivered almonds. Always. A really classy event would have meatballs mixed in with the rigatoni and tomato sauce, liberally seasoned, but they weren't required. There's a story there, too.

Here, our shredded chicken is sold much more often at youth sporting events, or offered up at a concession stand for a band festival or choral contest. It's our preferred mass feeding option. And while churches may not still maintain a china tea service or punchbowl set for wedding receptions, they hold onto their roasters. Those big old roasters have many applications, but it's shredded chicken that I imagine in them whenever I walk past a row of them in a darkened church basement, waiting patiently to be filled in order to fill waiting stomachs.

We may still not have found a path to shared communion between all Christian traditions, but there's a place where we all welcome one another wherever you come from, and that's when churches feed people. After a graveside service in a church basement, Thanksgiving Sunday dinners, in seasonal celebrations of many sorts where guests are invited and made welcome.

For us, in this area, that place of communion is around the humble shredded chicken sandwich. There we may yet all be one.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's sure we can find unity around shredded chicken. Tell him how you see us living and eating as one at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.