Several churches in Wichita offer dinners for the public and hold bake sales each year. It helps them reach out to the community, and it helps their bottom lines.
Two festivals featuring Lebanese food have been drawing big crowds to St. George and St. Mary churches for eight decades.
More than a thousand people came to St. Mary’s Mediterranean Festival this past weekend. KMUW’s Deborah Shaar takes us inside the kitchen where it all begins.
Greg Ferris is scooping carefully measured flour and sugar into the large steel bowl of a commercial grade stand-mixer. He wears a white apron, and a light coating of flour covers his arms and hands. This area of the kitchen inside St. Mary Orthodox Christian Church is his domain.
"I’m the dough maker," Greg says.
Yeast and salt come next, and then he gives it a quick stir by hand. Water and oil are the last to go in before he flips on the mixer.
Six simple ingredients come together to make one of the more popular food items at St. Mary’s Mediterranean Festival: loaves of Lebanese bread known as talami.
"My dad used to do this, so when he passed, I started doing it for him," Greg says. "So I do it in honor of my dad and my mom. And this is the only time I get to boss my sisters around. Otherwise, they are always bossing me around."
Mom is 94-year-old Lorraine Ferris. She's standing with several other women around a small kitchen counter lined with extra-large baking sheets. Their job is to shape and flatten the three-quarter pound dough balls into roughly eight-inch circles. They need to get more than 200 loaves shaped and baked for the festival.
These hands have patted a lot of dough over the years. Lorraine Ferris and her husband were one of the first families who made St. Mary’s their church home.
The church was founded in 1932 by a group of Lebanese and Syrian immigrants. The community dinners came a few years later. Lorraine remembers how they used to have to make the baklava dough by hand. They would roll the dough out paper-thin and stack layers with nuts and sugar in between.
"We made the dough and made the baklava, and that is a really tricky, hard work," Lorraine says. "And now we can buy the phyllo dough, which is great. That is the good part. We’re so happy about that."
In the Ferris family, like many other families at St. Mary’s, children grow up helping with the festival. As adults, they continue taking shifts each year, and now bring their own kids to help. The days leading up to the event are filled with prep work, cooking and baking.
After all, it takes a lot to host a family dinner for more than a thousand people each year.
"It is the place to see and be seen. It really is," says Jay Price, WSU's Local and Community History Program director.
Price has studied Lebanese heritage in Wichita. He says the food festivals offered at St. Mary’s on the west side and St. George on the east side have a strong legacy in the community.
"It’s generation to generation," Price says. "If you’re part of one of those congregations, you’re going to be at the dinner, and you’re going to be helping. It’s a whole family, a whole congregation effort. I think there’s a passion for it that shows. This isn’t just something that people are going through the motions. There’s a sense of pride that you’re doing this."
Price says these food festivals helped to introduce home-cooked Lebanese cuisine to Wichita Midwesterners. The community’s love of Middle Eastern food grew over the years to inspire a remarkable stable of local restaurants.
"We’re used to going out to Mediterranean food," Price says. "And so, it’s familiar. It’s Wichita comfort food."
Back in the kitchen the day before the festival, Tracy Namee, Greg’s younger sister, does a status check on the bread loaves waiting to go into the oven. All five brothers and sisters in the Ferris family are working together today.
"My siblings are all here, either mixing dough, or, you know, helping with the cooking of it, and one brother is just eating," Tracy says.
She says this is one event her family never misses, including one sister, who travels from Chicago to help out. Tracy says volunteers, all church members, are the key to the festival’s success.
"There’s a lot of people who take off. They take vacation days," Tracy says. "They do what they can to get here in the evening if they couldn’t be here in the day."
As the St. Mary’s congregation grew to include other ethnicities, so did its annual fundraising event. The traditional plated Lebanese dinners evolved into a broader Mediterranean celebration with entertainment and a shop for specialty food and gifts. A variety of family-recipe dishes from Lebanon, Greece, Syria and Serbia are available for eat-in or carryout.
St. Mary’s donates 10 percent of net proceeds from the festival to a local charity each year. The Wichita Children’s Home's “Opportunity Zone” will benefit this year.
The baked bread loaves, fresh from the oven, get one final step: a splash of melted butter on top. Esther Henry has been doing that part for more than 70 years.
"If they don’t look good, why, we reject them. And sometimes we cut them up, and everyone has a piece," Henry says. "Or somebody will buy them and take them home, but they don’t go to waste."
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Follow Deborah Shaar on Twitter @deborahshaar
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