Every Adventist potluck table tells a story, and most of those stories end with somebody going back for seconds.
So BarelyAdventist ranked the classics. This is our opinion, not a survey, and we know your church does it differently.
Most popular
1. Haystacks. Chips, beans, cheese, lettuce, salsa, stacked however you like. Ella May Hartlein is credited with a version called the “Hartlein Special” in the early 1950s, though other Adventists remember similar plates even earlier.
2. Special K loaf, also called cottage cheese loaf. The original recipe appeared in the 1967 cookbook An Apple a Day and is credited to Betty Jutzy.
3. Worthington Fri-Chik. Worthington Foods began in 1939 in Worthington, Ohio, at the Harding Sanitarium kitchen. Its first well known product was Choplets, made mostly from wheat protein.
4. Big Franks and Linketts. Loma Linda Foods began in 1905 as the bakery for the Loma Linda Sanitarium.
5. Scalloped potatoes, which vanish faster than anyone admits.
Healthiest
1. Lentil roast. Lentils and grains, with nothing to apologize for.
2. Haystacks again, if you go heavy on the lettuce and light on the cheese.
3. Green bean casserole, mostly because it contains green beans.
4. Gluten steaks and Choplets. Plenty of protein, but they are processed foods.
5. Jell-O salads. They bring color and joy, and that is about it.
One footnote for the purists. Loma Linda Foods was owned by the church until 1990, and Worthington Foods was an independent company that later owned the Loma Linda brand too. Kellogg bought Worthington in 1999, and Atlantic Natural Foods later bought the canned Loma Linda line along with rights to the Worthington brand.
What did we get wrong? Tell us your church’s top dish and the one you quietly skip.
Photo: Potluck, Harvest Hall, Tieton, Washington, by Leslie Seaton, CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/), via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Potluck_(8167936623).jpg (cropped, text added)
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