Spending time with Mom in the kitchen flipping through old church cookbooks is like stepping into a warm, butter-scented time machine. The pages are yellowed, dotted with splatters from long-forgotten Sunday suppers, and handwritten notes in the margins tell their own stories. As we turned each page, we talked about the ladies who submitted the recipes—Pomy Gissendanner’s sour cream pound cake, Sue Head’s congealed salad—each name triggering memories of potlucks, revivals, and Easter Sunday hats. Somewhere between the casseroles and the cobblers, we landed on a cabbage casserole recipe that sounded too simple to be good—but we gave it a try anyway. As it baked, the kitchen filled with a comforting, savory smell that reminded us both of potluck dinners in the church fellowship hall.

Our conversations drifted easily from cornbread to clothes, from deviled eggs to the dresses I wore growing up in the ’70s—polyester prints, bell-bottoms, and platform shoes. She laughed remembering how church was a weekly runway, with girls in patent leather shoes and boys slicked down with Blue Magic. While the casserole bubbled in the oven, we talked about family, about growing up with cousins just a mile “down the road”, about front porch swings, shucking corn and shelling peas in the summer. There’s something sacred in these small moments—in the sound of her voice, the rustle of cookbook pages, and the warmth that only a southern kitchen, full of stories and something good in the oven, can hold.

Southern Cabbage Casserole

Ingredients

Instructions 

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