Our Lady of the Cedars, a church in Manchester’s east end, held its annual Middle Eastern food festival over the weekend. On the menu: baked beef, lentil and onion mujaddara, falafel wraps and mamoul cookies.
Volunteers said the line for the food tent gets longer every year. Now in its 50th iteration, Mahrajan — advertised on festival posters as Arabic for “a wicked good time” — is both a church fundraiser and a way for the church to share their faith and their food with the community.
But feeding hundreds of people takes a village - or a congregation – to pull it off.
Parishioner Nikki Bullock helps run the kitchen. She said one of her earliest memories of Mahrajan is of her mom, Marylou, who helped run the kitchen before she died last year.
“A lot of these recipes have been passed down from the generations of this church. So you taste the love in every bite,” Bullock said. “We get to stay connected to these people that have gone, but their food is still here.”
For Bullock, stuffing grape leaves with lamb, rice, and spices is a literal way to stay connected to her roots in Greece and Lebanon. Many of those grape leaves come from a vine that was planted by her great grandmother and propagated around peoples' backyards in Manchester.
Father Tom Steinmetzhis said that about 80 volunteers pitched in to prepare pita for sandwiches, grill the kebabs, run game booths, make pastries – and even supervise the pony rides.
“It's a lot of work for the people here,” he said. “I'm so proud of them because they take pride in wanting to put on something that the community enjoys.”
Tradition is important to this community. It's a Melkite Catholic church, which traces its historical lineage to a church founded in Antioch by St. Peter himself. This church in Manchester was founded by Middle Eastern immigrants who moved to the city to work in the mills in the 1930s.
Richard Palazzolo the third has been volunteering for over a decade. He isn’t originally from the Middle East, but loves the cultural diversity of his church – not to mention the lamb shawarma.
“It's really a beautiful thing because there's also people that come here from really far away,” he said. “It's a really interesting experience to have so many different people come here from vastly different backgrounds.”
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