Those People at That Church

In the early 1990s, when San Francisco was an epicenter of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and medical treatment for the disease was in its early stages, one local faith community was able to do just that with a cookbook. Titled Those People at That Church, the self-published collection of recipes from San Francisco’s St. Francis Lutheran Church appeared in November 1994.

In many ways, it’s a classic U.S. community cookbook: a wide-ranging collection produced by committee, featuring group-sourced recipes to raise funds for a cause. For Those People at That Church, the cause was a faith community navigating a troubled relationship to its national body, performing ministry in the Castro, a mostly queer neighborhood struggling with AIDS and its devastation. --<a href="https://food52.com/story/27379-those-people-at-that-church-community-cookbook-history">John Birdsall</a>