'Gospel Gourmet' dishes up faith

Sauteed asparagus, sun-dried tomatoes, red onions and roasted peppers tossed with bowtie pasta, topped with feta cheese: A meal with the "Gospel Gourmet" is good food for the body, as well as the soul.

Rev. Thomas Berardi, pastor of St. Vincent's parish in Cobleskill, chuckles about his unusual nickname. Though he regularly does presentations on the "gourmet Gospel" -- in other words, how Jesus used meals as opportunities to teach -- he never expected the term to be used on him.

Still, while "some people golf, I cook," he stated. "It's a hobby and relaxation."

Recipe for success

Father Berardi has been interested in gourmet cooking since college, where he joked that cooking was a survival skill.

Hailing from a family where Polish and Italian meals were the norm, he began to tinker with recipes as soon as he lived on his own.

A flourish for food runs in his family: The priest's nephew is a chef who graduated from the Culinary Institute of America; a cousin runs a restaurant in Woodstock. Father Berardi himself worked in a relative's deli while he was in the seminary, as well as working for Carroll's -- the forerunner of Burger King -- during college.

First try

His first solo cooking effort was lasagna. "My sister `fed' me the recipe over the phone," he remembered.

As he assembled the ingredients, he realized not only that he could make the dish, but that "I didn't have to do it exactly the way she told me."

Today, he jokes, "I got confidence from the lasagna." He also got ideas for meals from Gourmet and Cooking Light magazines -- and from the numerous cooking shows on television.

"I watch Emeril," he affirmed. "A lot of his stuff is not exotic; that's why he's so popular. He takes very simple stuff and makes it gourmet-ish, just in what he does with it."

He also enjoys "Carmine's Table," a locally produced cooking show that airs on WNYT. Father Berardi noted that chef Carmine Sprio tends to make interesting dishes from staples like chicken.

Pasta perfect

Pasta dishes are still Father Berardi's favorite concoctions, although he's branched out to cooking exotic Greek and Middle Eastern meals. For example, pork loin with chutney stuffing and yellow rice with raisins have found their way to his table.

Along the way, the priest/chef has also progressed from cooking for himself to serving others -- including his parishioners. "One year in the parish, we had a silent auction," he explained. "I offered a gourmet meal for ten people."

The dinner got so many bids that at the following year's auction, the auctioneer asked the crowd, "How many people would give $50 for a gourmet meal?"

"Seventy people stood up!" Father Berardi told The Evangelist. "They said to me, `This is a chance to make a lot of money for the parish.'"

Cooking for others

The priest agreed to host the meal, which turned into a massive undertaking. He enlisted friends and his chef-cousin to help, and cooked each course in front of the diners, explaining the ingredients and telling stories. Then the other chefs served that course to the group.

"I like to cook for others," the priest commented. "I like other people to enjoy what I'm making."

From there, it was only natural to begin thinking about the spiritual side of cooking. Father Berardi was asked to speak at a Christian men's breakfast in Cobleskill. At a loss for a topic to use with the mostly evangelical group, he took a friend's suggestion to "talk about something you know," and spoke on spirituality and food while wearing his chef's hat, with a frying pan for a prop.

That evolved into the "gourmet Gospel."

Celebration

"Food is a celebration of life," Father Berardi explained. "In the ten meals [mentioned] in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus uses the meal gathering to teach. Food helps us enter into communion with other people, through a meal."

Today, the priest serves up this message at presentations at men's breakfasts, campus ministry meetings, retreat houses and events for the elderly.

During his "gourmet Gospel" presentations, Father Berardi dons an apron and chef's hat. Inevitably, the title of his talks has been turned around to the nickname "the Gospel Gourmet."

Nourishment

Father Berardi sometimes uses fake ingredients to make his point. At a recent day of reflection for seniors at the Dominican Retreat and Conference Center in Niskayuna, for example, the priest opened a real pizza box but passed out paper "pizza slices" with words on them for participants to search out on a reflection paper.

Often, however, the ingredients are real. When Father Berardi talks about Jesus calling people "the salt of the earth," he pulls out a can of Morton salt and asks his audience what symbolism they see in it.

Once, addressing teenagers at the diocesan Christian Leadership Institute, he uncovered a can of soup and a bowl, and called it the "soup-or-bowl." As the group groaned at the Super Bowl pun, he asked them whether they saw themselves as one object or the other.

He was amazed at their answers. "One girl said, `I sometimes feel like that empty bowl,'" he recalled. "A guy said, `I feel like the soup that's all over the place and needs the bowl to keep it contained.' Some saw Jesus as the bowl."

Stirring it up

Father Berardi also puts his own ideas into the mix. In discussing the Gospel story of the woman who comes to a Pharisee's house when Jesus is eating there and washes His feet with her hair, Father Berardi calls her "that silent, uninvited guest to the meal" and talks about what she might symbolize.

The talks, he noted, aren't really about food; meals just give the stories a context or setting. But "I speak about food, and how I like food and cooking," he remarked.

He often goes back to the lasagna he first cooked. No single ingredient is the lasagna, he said, just as no one belief is the Church; all parts of life and faith come together to create the Church.

Father Berardi's next project may be a bit bigger than a meal or a talk: He hopes to turn his presentations into a book on food and Scripture.

"I always make mental notes for the gourmet Gospel," he said.

(8/12/04)